


Repenting for Someone Else's Sins

by giwp



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Titans, Anxiety Attacks, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Kidnapping, M/M, POV Alternating, POV First Person, Panic Attacks, Victim Blaming, has nothing to do with christianity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-09
Updated: 2015-06-12
Packaged: 2018-03-06 19:58:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 38,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3146726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/giwp/pseuds/giwp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sitting in the backseat, leaned up against the door trying to get away from the repercussions, staring down at the reality of what's just happened was like a punch to the gut that couldn't be forgiven or explained. It was years of choking down emotions because you didn’t want to make dad mad and mom wasn't there anymore to help calm you down. Years of trying to understand but not really because elementary school never taught you how to cope with whatever the heck this all is. </p><p>A story about Marco and Jean living through the worst days of their young lives and coping with it differently, together and by themselves. Handling different demons while finding similarities in the other that bring them close in a setting that doesn't offer that comfort.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Repercussions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Repercussion**. | _noun_. | an unintended consequence occurring some time after an event or action, especially an unwelcome one

When you're young, you don't realize the messed up shit that happens in the world. You're able to sit and turn a blind eye at the mugging happening across the street at the drugstore a block from your apartment complex. You can sit in the backseat of a beat up pickup truck and wonder why dad's sorting through every seat and looking through ashtrays and pockets in the doors while you wait for that ice cream you love from the gas station. It's sitting in the kitchen, grubbing down on macaroni and cheese shaped like Spongebob Squarepants while dad's 'doing business' in the living room with a couple of large men with a lot of black clothes. It's spending the hour before bedtime counting freckles in the mirror while the fireworks went on outside and people yelled but you weren't allowed to go watch because good boys don't peep outside windows during the night.

But then you hit a point where you grow up. Something comes into your life and threatens to shake down the entire structure from the foundation up.

You start to realize just how fucked you're life really is. You see the hints that something bad or something big is about to happen. You see the signs from a mile away that something's been on the backburner of everyday life and that it's about bubble over and drown the entire room with it's repercussions.

Sitting in the backseat, leaned up against the door trying to get away from the repercussions, staring down at the reality of what's just happened was like a punch to the gut that couldn't be forgiven or explained. It was years of choking down emotions because you didn’t want to make dad mad and mom wasn't there anymore to help calm you down. Years of trying to understand but not really because elementary school never taught you how to cope with whatever the heck this all is.

So you do whatever any little kid would do. Even if you are rounding up becoming 11 in two weeks. You cry. I cry. I Marco Bodt cried like a pissy little baby that doesn't understand the world and the repercussions of what's just happened. 

I didn't sign up for any of this. I'd expected ice cream from the gas station. I'd expected nights of Spongebob mac and cheese on school nights.

But growing up in a family of two with just a father to look up to. - to follow - meant going along with whatever happened to live for another day.

You followed the rules and followed his words because if you didn't there would be repercussions.

But could someone please tell me why _this_? What was the point of this? Why would you ever do this to another kid when you have a perfectly good one thrumming on the door handle; always there behind you. Following everything you do. Fearing that you'd leave them or cause worse damage than good.

Nothing makes sense and it's all that I can do to drown out the tears into the sleeve of my shirt because dad can't know how scared I am. How scared I am for the boy laying across the seat a foot away from me, knocked out with a growing bruise on his head.

Dad had said we were going to the park to play on the slides. He'd said that this playground is newer than the one he normally let me walk to a few blocks from home. There would be slides and monkey bars and if they hurried, they'd be able to snag a swing for me to play on. For any other 11 year old, the appeal wouldn't have been there; it wouldn't have been so outstanding. But years of feeling the backseat of the truck digging into my spine while I waited for dad's business transitions had me excited for the little time I'd be able to spend with him. It was selfish. And usually Marco Bodt isn't the selfish type. But this would have to be the exception. I was excited.

And now it's turned to the polar opposite. And I'm terrified. Being selfish couldn't have resulted to this. The kid's lip is bleeding and this cannot be my fault at all. Nope. I didn't do this.

Breathe shaky, it's hard to figure out how to inhale oxygen into my system. I need to calm down before I make dad mad. Looking up towards the front of the car, it's obvious that dad is already flustered beyond recognition. He doesn't look the same and the dad that I know who'd buy me candy when I was little. The lines of stress or worry or anxiety apparent between his eyebrows and running across his forehead. Even he knows the gravity of what’s laying in the backseat. But he doesn’t turn around to check on them. He trusts me to look after the boy with the blonde hair with the weird haircut and manage to keep him on the seat while he made dangerous turns. Hopefully racing back home before I throw up onto the matted floor of his dear truck.

The kid across the seat seems to stir a little and it takes everything to not let out a yelp from the suddenness of it. The hope that he wasn't dead relaxing me for only a second until I realize what that means. Dad's gonna throw a fit. A moan releases from his mouth and it grows louder as he’s swished side to side from the movement of the speeding car. He’s going to fall off and be doing more than moaning.

“Dad! I think-I think he’s waking up,” I yell over the buzz of the engine. He barely registers it as he continuously looks through the rear-view mirror. Searching for followers probably.

Don’t I’m the only one here.

I look back over to the boy. He’s brought a hand up to his head, running it and wincing as his thin fingers graze over the swelling on his head. The moans still muffled by the tape. Fear roars into my ears and my body stiffens against the front seat I’m leaning into to catch my dad’s attention. Dilated pupils, eyes the color of thickened honey, blink into the direct light of the setting sun.

I snap my head back towards the front of the car as the movement within my peripherals become more aware. “Dad!! He’s awake.”

“Shut up, Marco!” he roars at the steering wheel, never letting his eyes leave the road ahead. “Look. Just-just get him to stay quiet. Or knock him the fuck out I don’t know. We’re almost home. Keep him quiet!”

That’s a lot of responsibility for a kid with only a stick of gum in his pockets and no idea why the boy is even in the backseat.

“Listen, Marco. I-I’ll explain everything when we get home.”

Turning back to face the cause of all of the world’s problems, I realize that although his blinking up at the ceiling of the moving vehicle seems determined, it’s terribly hazy and his eyes seem to focus in and out. Almost like he doesn’t care. Or doesn’t understand what’s happening. Same, dude.

With a snap of tawny eyes, I’m left staring down at a wounded boy. A shudder runs through my entire body as his stare turns from confusion, to fear, to unadulterated anger. The fire behind his eyes seem to sear into the depths of my mind and no. I’ll never be able to forgive himself for this. Even if it wasn’t my fault. I don’t know what to do. What are you supposed to do when you’ve kidnapped some rich kid from the park and have him stuffed in the back of a rusty, 20 year old pickup truck that’s careening through the city.

“I-”

I just wanted to be pushed on the swings. I wanted to feel the weight of my dad’s hands on my back as I tasted the fresh air reached at maximum height. The feeling of kicking my legs through and feeling nothing pushing back on me. I wanted to feel free. But I’m left here. Confined behind the seats cutting into my sides with every sharp turn. Trying to find a breath and finding a way to tell the boy that he doesn’t understand either.

Pulse rushing as the stare goes on for what feels like hours. How long does it take to get home from the park? It didn’t feel this long when they were getting there.

As if on cue, the brakes screech to a halt in what I thought would be the parking lot the apartment’s residents used. Instead, I looked out the windows and found ourselves in some area outside of the neighborhood we’ve lived in for years. The tops of the skyscrapers of the city far off in the distance. I remember coming to this place once. Dad had said it was where him and mom used to live before things had gotten rough and they had to move closer to the city to make sure one of them was always around me when I was just a baby. I used to think it was stupid. Why move from a perfectly good house to the scary apartment with closed off rooms and cold bath water when they could be in a place that came with a yard. But life isn’t fair and I realized that quickly enough. It’s a jolt to your system; watching your mom slowly lose herself in bottles of pills and squishy bags with the pee colored medicine.

Dad’s voice comes like a nail in his head. “Marco. Grab the bags from the trunk. I’ll get the kid.” The words swim in my head and I can’t move my gaze from the boy’s face. The blood from his lips is still bleeding through the tape and that bruise looks horrible. I have to get him ice or he’s gonna be even madder about it. “Marco!”

Jumping from the proximity of the voice I turn my head to look straight into my dad’s eyes. He’s standing over the boy’s head, ready to pull him out of the car. And it’s like something cracks in the boy’s eyes and he’s suddenly very aware of his situation. A kick into my stomach and there’s nowhere left for me to go except to open the door and run towards the sidewalk. The second my feet hit the broken concrete of the walkway I feel myself collapse onto my knees. Breathes still a strain on my entire body.

I stare down at the ground, eyes meeting the tiny army of ants making their way towards the small sheet of grass lain before the house. Who knows what it is the ants are trying to accomplish. They’re tiny and I think about how easily it is when you’re little to get crushed of any high hopes or dreams you have. It could take one decision from something far bigger than you to crush it into pieces. One small step and everything is over. Everything is fleeting. Everything dies. Every _one_ dies.

I really miss mom.

“Marco what did I say?!” comes the sharp voice behind me. It’s not a yell, no. Can’t have other people hearing us and peeking through their blinds to find out what the commotion could be. Nope. Turning around, still on the ground, I find my dad carrying the boy with the weird hair in his arms like he was cradling a baby. He seems to be asleep again. The bile threatens to rise and spill out of my mouth but I wash it down and raise myself off the ground. The bags need to be taken inside.

As I makes my way back towards the bed of the truck, I pass my dad and the smell hits me. Or rather lack thereof. Alcohol wasn’t involved in any of this yet the nightmare is realer than if there would’ve been. The faint smell of some kind of fancy lotion also wafts through the air as the head of the boy brushes past my face. He smells like warmth and like he belongs to a family – a mother – that cares enough to send his boy out to play at the park with the swings that could touch the skies with a kiss on his head.

One shuddering breathe and I’m finally able to gain the strength to open the latch and pull the bags out. There’s a lot of them. Dad had spent hours the night before packing them, saying he was going to take them to get them all cleaned and pressed. Ready for the new school year.

School doesn’t even start for another 3 months.

This isn’t my fault.

I’m not the one responsible for the lies.

Grabbing a couple of the bags and hefting them over every part of my body I make to follow dad into the house. He’d somehow managed to open the lock with his hands full of a stranger’s child. If anyone were to look through their windows they’d probably think we were a downright sweet family of three just moving in.

Dropping the bags near the door, I follow the two into the hallway. Peeking glances at the open doors I notice that they’re all furnished already. The living room even had a TV and the kitchen seemed to have pots and pans. But the last door down the hall is what catches my attention as I turn away from what is obviously meant to be my room in this place.

There’s a latch the size of a book on what would’ve been a fairly plain wooden door. Three smaller locks bolted on under them. I watch dad grab a set of keys hooked onto a nail next to the top, newly replaced hinge. He starts on unlocking them all and once it’s open, slips into the room.

Nothing left to do but follow.

“Dad?” I chance to say into the dark room. There’s only a little light coming from the ceiling where the ingrained light bulb flickers with underuse. From what I can make out, the room is barren. A small bed lying in the corner with no toys to play with in sight.

Is this supposed to be the boy’s room? He’s going to get really bored. Maybe dad will let me bring him some toys to play with or-

Dad drops the tawny-eyed boy onto the bed like a bag of rice. My breathe falters, afraid that the same repercussions may come. Cleaning rice from the floor isn’t a fun job when you’re barely able to fully use chubby sausage fingers.

Dad moves around in the cold room for a while, searching for something giving me the chance to look around. The windows seems to be sealed shut, the air trapped inside already stuffy from the summer heat. The flickering lights could do a number on vision until it finally decides to settle on a hazy glow set across the room. There’s a small bookshelf in the corner. It doesn’t hold much except for a few books I remember reading as a little kid at bedtime with mom.

Suddenly dad seems to snap back and realize I’m still standing in the doorway and he points a dust-covered finger in the direction of the front door. Must be from the playground’s sand. “Go grab the rest of the bags.”

I stay rooted there. Standing. Wanting to ask for an explanation. Why is there a room here that looks like a jail cell? Why is there a strange boy flinching into the dirty pillow on a worn out bed in the back room? What’s happening?

With one step forward, dad makes asking seem like a faraway dream. He wanted hands to push him higher not bring him down on the ground groveling for mercy. Follow. Right.

It takes a couple of trips back and forth but I finally manage to bring in all of the bags with no one from the neighborhood noticing. Or if they did notice, they knew better than to approach a strange kid. Usually people understand that it comes with obvious repercussions. Usually.

Walking in with the last load – which includes my old Kermit the Frog backpack I would use to put all of my crayons in in kindergarten – I find dad on the phone in the kitchen. He seems to be in some deep argument over something and I’ve had enough experience to know not to interrupt him when he’s fuming into a receiver.

Quietly, I make towards to the door with far too many locks. It’s still left open and as I stick my head through the door, bangs falling into my eyes, I find the boy, tape still over his mouth and arms behind his back, staring at the floor. I follow his gaze and when I see what’s attached to his leg it’s difficult to muffle the sound of drawing in air through my teeth. The rush of it burning my gums like it’s on fire.

The boy notices and it’s back again. The feeling of being pricked apart by a thousand red lasers until I can’t breathe anymore. The anger is there. But he doesn’t lash out as anyone would expect. He just sits there, hands folded onto his lap, breathing through his nose. The urge to walk over and wipe my sleeve over the blood dripping down from the tape over his mouth is shut down by the sound of dad walking down the hall.

He doesn’t register me standing and shivers his way through. Standing in the room now, he continues talking on the floor.

“Yeah. He seems to be fine. Got a stare like a little snotty rich boy that’s for sure.” There’s a pause as he listens to whoever is on the other end say something. “And you’re this is going to work, right? I get half of whatever the ransom ends up being and no one knows the boy was ever in my house?”

There must’ve been a confirmation of the deal on the other end as he then nods and bids the caller with no appropriate farewell I was ever taught.

Dad then addresses me, voice sturdy where I’m falling apart of his words. “Ransom”?

“Marco let’s talk out front.” Not so much a question or suggestion as it is a command leaving me following him out of the room. He locks the door behind us but not before telling the boy to “keep his mouth” as he cuts open the restraints left on his hands. The last thing I see is him ripping off the tape from bloody lips and launching into a volatile scream. That is until the door shuts and everything is silent. Room must be soundproofed.

I make my way towards the living room, head swimming with possibilities of what’s happening.

“This kid comes from this rich family near downtown. They own basically every business that runs down our street back in the city and hundreds of more across the city. I know you don’t really understand what’s happening but, Marco, we need the money. Keeping this kid here with us means there will be money on the line to get him back home safely. I have friends that are going to help us but until they decide how much it is that we’d be getting, he’s going to stay here with us. Does that make any sense?”

There’s a rush back in my ears. It threatens to drown out everything that dad’s just said. It’s the feeling of watching the tiny army of ants climb up a tiny hill a dirt. Watching them struggle up and up to reach a top that holds no trophy. Nothing to show that they can do so much and go home and make their families warm with happiness. It’s the feeling of watching the kid from the upper grade walk over with a juice pouch and drown them before they even have a chance to realize that it was all for nothing. That there are faults in trying so hard. Because you can easily be knocked down when you ride too high and try too hard to become known for climbing that stupid little hill.

I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to tell my dad that this is stupid and I want to go back home and eat cereal and watch cartoons. It’s drowning in a sticky mess that I can’t come back from. It’s being thrown into a pit to await being found and slaughtered for something that isn’t even my fault.

“What’s his name?”

The sound of my voice, cracking on the words, must’ve jolted my dad but he ignores it and settles to say something I wasn’t really expecting to get from the very beginning when we stepped onto that playground in upper eastside Trost.

The truth.

“Jean.”


	2. Numb

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The appeal of freedom, to feel the rush of air on my face without someone sticking their own into the bubble was what brought this all on but the fight between blaming myself or the litter of stars above me numbs me to my core.
> 
>  **Numb**. | _adjective_. | deprived of the power of sensation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jean's point of view during the car ride. This is just to get everyone acquainted with Jean's thoughts. Later chapters won't be so parallel in details and would move on with the plot rather than go back.

Once upon a time in a land covered in car smog and bad aesthetics lived a boy with a bitterness for everything in the world and no interest in the money his parents threw into his face. He drowned in cash every time he set foot into the house he lived in, into the room he was assigned to at birth.

It would’ve been a happy life if it weren’t for the fact that stepping foot on just a patch of grass on their land felt like drowning. Drowning in the feeling that no one cared as long as they could pay for the repercussions of his actions. Drowning in the reminder that father hasn’t set a foot in the boy’s room in weeks. Drowning without a buoy to grab on to. Nothing to keep his head from falling below breathable level.

And so he drowned. The only intake of breathe coming from the chance to leave the suffocating land but never getting a chance to be away for longer than a few hours for a boy must always return home to uphold his responsibilities. The boy must always come home to help mother around the house and to be there for when her duties of yelling across the property for him to clean his room become consistent. He’s used to the life but the need for more in his life was apparent.

So one day he left.

And let me tell you, I am the best person to explain how big of a mistake that was because that boy was me. Jean Kirschtein. Son of big business man, Garrett Kirschtein and Rose Kirschtein. The kid who decided he’d had enough of hearing mother yelling at me about leaving my iPad on the counter and almost spilling a little bit of cola on it – it wasn’t even close to touching where my headphone jack was still connected, okay? I was tired so I figured a trip to the park would be a great idea. Let off some steam and get some air into my lungs before rupturing a vein in my head became more of an unchanging prophecy than a lonely prediction.

I’m probably the most pathetic and stressed out eleven year you’ll ever hear from. I can’t wait until I’m older and in college living off of dad’s money and mooching all of mom’s cooking still. It’s going to be great or at least I hope so. I hope that it even happens because being locked up to a rusty bed doesn’t bring a lot of free thinking and there isn’t much light shining through these windows.

My dad had started out normal enough.

I left the house early figuring the sooner I got to the park the longer mother would think I’m still sleeping in and wouldn’t come barging in to check on me. Walking to the park wasn’t that big of a deal. It was only a couple of blocks away from our property and if I could’ve found my motor scooter that morning it would’ve taken a little over 10 minutes to sift through the pedestrian traffic that going into the suburbs had. A bunch of moms and nannies – probably still drunk on their morning wines or last night’s old people parties – usually streamed in and out of the park but today it was like everyone was too lazy or too wasted to even try to get through the summer heat. The few people I did run across were burly men that looked like they’d spilled an entire water bottle over their heads and had let it dribble onto their backs directly into their armpits.

By the time I got to the park, even I was a sweaty mess. Tee shirt already sticking to my back, I was not going to back down from staying out here until mother came speeding in her car to take me home before dad got off of work for dinner.

There was pretty much nobody else in the park. Some kid with a ridiculously colored shirt was over by the slide staring at the swings and what was probably his dad stood under the tree by the monkey bars watching the bugs crawl along the pavement. It was peaceful.

Having a Saturday to myself at the park was becoming a ritual and at this point I’m surprised my mother hasn’t already shown up knowing I’d be here just like always. But hey. Carpe diem or whatever it was Robin Williams said in that old movie the nanny made me watch last year because I wouldn’t sit still. Thank god she’s gone though. The girl would bring her boyfriend on nights she knew my parents would be gone long after midnight. My ears are forever scarred for life with all the mushy talk that I overheard from the top of the stairs.

But to each their own. He probably lives inside that girl’s locket and that’s something I doubt I’ll ever get a chance to be.

That’s a story for another time because there are bigger fish to fry and that high-flying, air-cutting swing looks awfully appealing in this heat.

One second I was making plans to launch my shoes into the open blue sky and the next I’m tipping over and finding myself knocking against metal, unable to gain control of my hands. It was all a blur. Falling over backwards after a rather harsh push from someone who’d just popped out of nowhere and then finding myself staring up at the same kid with the ugly colored shirt crying his eyes.

If anything I should be crying. Being tied up and having nothing but pastel green and blue to look up at is horrible to wake up to.

It had all happened so fast, though. One second it was the rush of blood flowing through my body – under my skin – at the mere thought that I was out. I was out of the suffocating house. Out of the sightline my mother would hold over me, afraid I would try to get in her linen closet and make a mess as if I were still four years old. And then the next second came the overwhelming stench of plastic and rusted metal pressing against my face. It was the temporary fault in my vision as I tried to grasp at anything but then finding my hands incapable of moving.

It was numb along with every other part of my body.

I was in shock.

This isn’t the playground where the swingsets I threw myself off of when I was six sat rusting under the summer heat. I was moving and in no way was my vision pushing against blue skies littered with the occasional cloud or lazy bird. All I could see, as my vision flittered back from the dusty haze was the cracked leather of something moving along bumpy. Potholed roads. The feeling of a car swaying as the smell of gasoline mixes with the powerful smell of the tape covering my mouth is enough to make me gag. I want to cry. The tears are ready to pour out at a second’s notice. Everything is overwhelming and I don’t know what else to do.

I turn my head, trying to assess my surroundings. The cracked leather belongs to the bench in the backseat of some kind of car. The design of which is nothing I’ve ever seen before and I can only assume it belongs to an old model. A rusted old car or truck that Jean’s never took the time to care about let alone lay in before now.

There are holes and slashes in the fabric lain across the roof. Riveted holes that must have once been a part of a nice décor to the now musty piece of metal. I stare up at the roof of the vehicle, the dotted holes and tears piecing themselves into shapes as my vision threatens to blur. They’re like constellations that my eyes can’t help but connecting. Shapes and images throwing themselves across my face – similar to those I’d heard my mother describing.

When I was younger and less of a rebellious child, mother would tell me stories to get me to sleep. She’d tell me stories of great heroes and warriors. People that created change and died in honor. She told the stories of these great people who were pitied by the gods and turned immortal and given a permanent place in the largest Hall of Fame in existence. They were given their own stars ad stories to be told over open fires and numerous listeners. Their legacies were to live on forever in honor for their sacrifices. I had always thought of it to be noble-living to help the lesser and in return gaining the limelight and being immortalized. The thought of people sitting across the heat of an open flame, nothing better to do than talk about me was appealing.

The rumble of the car pushing over another pothole stirs me from my daydreams, leaving me back to staring against the cracks in the roof. The jolts from the thick, spindly leather digs against my spine and hands stuck under the bottom of my lower back is uncomfortable and painful and the urge to shift is apparently not enough for my body to actually react.

I flick my eyes away from the roof – the sight of it obviously not the same as an open sky. I feel claustrophobic laying there, no movement in my body and no way of voicing my discomfort.

The discomfort escalates as I feel the heat of eyes against my face. Physically unable to react, I’m only able to move my gaze from staring at blank space to the corners of my peripherals.

A boy, he looks to be my age maybe a few months or a year older, is staring down at me. Wide brown eyes, blown larger than normal and lips trembling as snot threatens to run down his face. He looks as stricken as how I feel laying there next to him. We stare at each other, me sizing him up and I can feel myself stealing my glare and I attempt to get a read on the boy. The unease shifts in him as I keep staring, eyes flitting across his face but maintaining it hard against him. His hands shake as he holds them in his lap as his eyes begin to tear up.

A second later, he’s thrown himself against the front seat and my eyebrows shoot up in surprise. Surprise that I hadn’t thought to look ahead to find the reason for my solution. Surprise that even though I know he’s saying something to the man in the front seat that I can barely see the characteristics of, I can’t seem to hear the words he is saying. It all comes in a hazy thought bubble, refusing to pop and tell me the secrets it holds over my life right now. From what I can see coming from the darker boy’s pained face, it’s visible that he’s on the edge of bawling his eyes out or shutting down completely as the man up front turns his head and shouts loud enough for me to hear the roar and watch the boy quieten and fall back against the door he had been leaning against.

I steel my gaze on him before his eyes turn back to me. There’s no reason for me to show how terrified I am – how insignificantly helpless I feel. I take the time I have before he notices me watching him take heavy shaking breathes to just look. I can’t tell whether he’s taller than me or not from the way he’s curled in on himself as far away from me as he can get. He’s far enough to where if I could feel my legs, they wouldn’t be able to kick him in the face as a distraction to escape which makes him smarter than the typical criminal you see in films. The possibility of which, though, doesn’t even seem necessary as he looks to be uninterested in being involved in the situation in the first place. His eyes flicker from me and back towards the crackling leather seats for what feels like hours and I wonder just where it is that we are going. I wonder what’s on the kid’s mind. He’s obviously not been prepared to be involved in a kidnapping and considering he doesn’t seem to be older than twelve. I’m glad that he’s as unprepared as I am to find myself in the back of the car, gagged and numb from the neck down.

The kid has freckles. Like a buttload of them. They reach from the hollows of his eyes and travel in scatters down his nose and shoulders, disappearing into the fabric of his thin shirt. His legs pulled up to his chest shake from the earthquake vibrating from his core. His arms wrapped around his knees are freckled with the same spots, darkened by the summer sun, contrasting against his bright shirt and it dawns on me why I feel like I’ve seen the boy with the selection of stars across a flat nose before.

Vaguely blurry images of the wistful look of a boy staring at the swingset flash through my memories. The image of a man standing below the shack of an expansive tree’s canopy, face muffled under the heatwaves rolling up and radiating from the pavement. These people had been at the park, waiting for an unsuspecting, unaccompanied minor to make an appearance I had fallen into the trap. The look on the boy’s face leaves no amount of sympathy for me anymore. He was there and he went along with this. He was as much responsible for this as much as the man in the front seat.

The scowl on my face sharpens and hardens the moment we lock eyes again. He visibly stiffens, playing the victim alongside me but he has no right. He has no right to request sympathy or anything from me and I stare back trying to find the movement of a heavy tongue in my mouth to give him a piece of my mind.

It’s ethereal my body still numb but I feel a slight shift in my position as the car jostles around and I watch the boy’s panic as he reaches forward prepared to prevent me from landing on my face on the cold hard floor. But he stiffens again mid-movement and turns his head back forward to address the man who I assume now must be his father. A father-son kidnapping duo? How quaint of a hobby.

His vision now away from my pathetic self, I attempt to make some kind of movement. The feeling in my leg is minimal if not invisible and I wonder what they put me under or what they stuffed down my throat leaving me so paralyzed and scared. The thought of having been drugged inciting panic in me as the words I’d always heard sprint through my head and leave me empty – needy – for the source. “Don’t take anything a stranger give you” was the mantra. It was simple and I’d followed the rules so far but the reality facing me now leaves me feeling horrible and broken as if I’d disappointed everyone I’d ever met.

It’s not my fault if I couldn’t escape the grips of a grown man let alone whatever was put into me. But the feeling of guilt is there nonetheless and I attempt to squirm in my place, a moan leaving my dry throat catching on the sticky tape across my lips. Everything is muffled and lost to the senses. It feels as though I’m drowning at the bottom of the ocean where everything rushes over me but my reactions are muted and slow from the heavy friction I try to push through. Every sound comes to me rippled into incoherency that even voice recognition machines wouldn’t be able to decipher.

I can hear the distant mumbling of a child’s voice and I close my eyes, refusing to look up at the source of the voice. A deeper set of vocals responds back, his voice less gentle or comforting as it slices through the vehicles. It’s enough to quieten the boy as I feel him settle back into the seat his eyes back to staring at me wriggling to regain the feeling of my arms.

His feet have moved forward enough to connect with mine across spindly, old fibers and I presume he’s unaware of the contact because even as the feeling of blood attempts to rush back into my extremities, I’ve become very aware of the touch. It makes me uncomfortable and I will myself to move more aggressively until I finally hear the car stop; the feeling of motion and momentum settling in the put of my stomach as I take a breath and still my movements for a second.

My heart races as I open my eye. All I see are those damned constellations again. Neither from the clear open sky or the torn fabric of the car’s roof. I see them scattered across the face of the boy huddled in front of my feet, eyes blown wide as he stare outside a grimy window listening to the muffled sounds of the man in the front seat – his father. He seems to be receiving direction – instructions – of some sort, but the words still come out garbled as I strain to catch any part of what they are saying. Anything of what I should expect from the worst car ride of my short life. But all I can see are the stars as I feel the heat still pressed against my feet. My shoes must have been taken off at some point. Probably as a second precaution to avoid unconsciousness by feet. I would’ve been able to knock out the stars and turned off the constellations I stare up at now. They would dim into nothingness and I would be able to breathe – if only for a few seconds – as all weight of fighting a hero’s battles would disappear.

The constellations be damned. I had no interest in becoming a hero anyway. Immortalization isn’t a game for humans to play and the thought of it seems so childish as I lay there, movements jerky, waiting for the inevitable. Waiting for the worst to arrive and send me to a place where the stars don’t exist.

Doors click and creak open and slam back against the rusty frame threatening loose bolts. The tiny amount of panic my body allows me, sparks into life and I thrash against the restraints. I manage somehow, to slip nimble hands out  of whatever was thrown around my wrists and at that I moment I hear the door at my feet open and feel the absence of heat as the body that was leaned against it leaves the car. I’m left alone long enough to pull one arm out from under me, plopping it out against the underside of the bench. The energy is draining and before I can become upset enough to find that strength to lash out, my eyes lock against a man’s face.

His eyes are beady and like steel but as I look at him I can see uncertainty. He looks like he has no idea what to do or what it is he’s gotten himself into. I think to myself, “I’m being kidnapped by an amateur and another kid.” It’s pathetic. All of this. The fact that I was picked up from an open park in broad daylight because I was being a whiny piss baby about cleaning my room ruins my mood. The accompanying fact that the hand holding a dirty wet rag over my face is shaking uncontrollably like an old man’s arthritis-riddled hand and I’m left paralyzed, arm flapping against my side, moans leaving my dry mouth hitting against the tape still left stuck on my lips pushes my own sanity off the rocks.

Mom would have been picking me up by now. She would’ve gone upstairs, ready to find an empty room, keys in hand and her white leather handbag slung around her small shoulder, making sure that she needs to make the drive to the park. Her should-length brown hair similar in color to the underside of my hair, bobbing with her steps to the car. She’s used to it. Used to finding me five minutes later sitting on the seat of the swingset, feet pushing against the wood chips straight into the open skies, the thirst for freedom and acknowledgment whipping me against my face. My resolve swinging on the cusps of breaking as I pendulum back and forth. She’d be pulling up to skid-marked streets missing the bob of the two-toned head roaming through the plastic jungle. Her panicked face replaced the face staring down at me, his hands pressed against my nose. Tears form behind my eyes but the gravity of everything refused to push them up towards the roof of the car. They don’t dare show themselves under the gaze of this strange man – under the gaze of my mother finding herself running around an empty park, searching for her only son.

Everything I feel pulls me back to my mother’s face and as I lose my sight to the growing blackness on the rims of my vision I’m left with the guilt that this isn’t anyone’s fault but my own. The clutter of people moving about, lifting and dropping boxes and suitcases comes across the distance that feels like yards away. It’s still muffled and my eyes and mind are too sluggish to react to the clattering but they register clearer than before. My eyes slowly flutter open, the dust of sleep ebbing away from the corners of my lashes leaving my staring up at a white ceiling.

For a second I believe I’m in my room, looking me at the pristinely lined painting of my walls and I relax against the bed. Seconds pass and the clutter continues and it’s then that I regain some composure into my body. My limbs tingle against a bed unfamiliar to me as the blood flows through my veins, waking them from whatever had polluted them.

I’m definitely not in my bed and the cracks of sunlight that hit my face from across the room leave me grasping for an anchor to bring myself upright.

The repercussions of the dirty cloth seem to have been far less the second time around and I’m able to gain back the control in my legs and arms far quicker than I was back in the car. I push myself up from the mattress that had been thrown against a metal frame and take in the room I’m in.

The walls are bare of any paint or hangings and as the door to the room stands slightly ajar, I can see out into a dimly lit hallway where most of the noise seems to be coming from. I can feel my breathing echoing through the stone walls and stare off across the expanse of the room towards the source of the light. The window is small, barely enough to fit a Chihuahua through and the bars securely fastened to the outside of it depletes any sort of motivation of escape.

I glance back at the door, the hinges looking new in comparison to the room itself and I wonder if an escape would be possible until it ceases all at once. I wait a beat figuring my chances until I see a set of eyes looking through. Brown irises, analyzing yet apprehensive as they take in the room. They haven’t seen me yet and I plomp back down against the mattress, feigning unconsciousness to avoid the boy. I don’t need to look at him and he doesn’t need to see me fall apart.

He stays in the doorway for a second, not making a noise, until the barreling presence of the man arrives. The voices come to my ears clearer now and I strain to avoid movement as I listen to them. The man’s voice is gruff, less than I had assumed to have heard in the car. The way he addresses his words, less harsh and more as if he’s talking to someone above him reminds me of those nights I could hear my own father in his office and I realize he must be on the phone with someone. Someone far above him in rank.

There are details that filter out the second they I hear him say the word.

This is a ransom situation then?

They assume my mommy and daddy are willing to pay the hefty fee to have their rebellious son back in one piece and the thought calms me in the tiniest ways. It means I won’t be chopped into tiny pieces – my intestines and organs used to make sausages or dog food. It means dad just has to cough over the money and I can leave and pretend the constellations were never a lie I found against chipping paint and stained leather seats under my fingertips.

I can forget this and live in my room until I graduate high school and then I can move away and never look back. I’d do anything to go back to my littered room and listen to my mother berate me over the growing pile of dirty tee shirts in the corner of my room.

I hear both of them leave the room, door clicking shut against the bolts and locks flicking into place. I listen for seconds waiting for the sounds of the bolts settling in to end. They either don’t trust the door itself to stay locked or themselves to somehow handle an eleven year old if he were to escape and the thought of that situation amuses me and I chuckle to myself morbidly as I sit up.

The room, as I look at it now with clearer eyes, is dingy to say the last. The floors and walls are a concrete mess that retains every sound and breathe I let out. No one will be able to hear me. The windows sealed shut makes sure of that as well as the nonexistent gap under the floor. No vents to whisper pleas or cries into. The suffocation follows me as my eyes trace along the cracks and splits in the plaster thrown over the walls.

I’m finally alone which has been the dream since I understood what privacy meant.

I’m alone and absolutely terrified. The only thing I’m certain of being the sound of a name thrown against dirty windows, gum-covered flooring of a speeding car, and grey walls in an unknown house.

His name was Marco and staring into the crevices of the darkening room, pulling tears back into myself, I promised not to ever fall into calling out Polo in the guise of wanting to not be so alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm remaking this story but I wanted to post up the second chapter since it's been a while. I want the style of this chapter throughout the entire piece and I'm just not happy with how I ended up wording chapter one because I felt like I was rushing for no reason. Chapter 1 will be edited up at some point but the plot will remain the same and I hope to get back into writing for this fic real soon. 
> 
>  
> 
> [tumblr](http://mamaarachne.tumblr.com/)


	3. Enclosed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stuffing your life inside boxes on boxes couldn't be as bad as living your life stuffed inside a box - wanting to break out but finding yourself locked by indiscriminate forces.
> 
>  **Enclosed**. | _verb_. | surround or close off on all sides

When I was younger, swimming was a consistent activity that my mom would throw me into. It was weeks of lessens to learn to keep myself floating above the water’s surface. Learning how to fight the water’s miniscule currents bent on pulling you under its force and filling your ears with rushing water and filling your mouth with its chlorine-enriched, bile-inducing taste. She had her reasons. Of course she did. She was a mother, my mother, and a mother would only submit her only son to a potential drowning incident if she had a very good reason with background and evidence and a perfectly formulated conclusion to back up her hypothesis for her little experimentation. She had her damn reasons to make me so afraid of getting swept away under the slightest resistant.

An ending that built walls up when the threat of the tiniest bit of downpour fell on my head. It left me wary of everything. The constant reminder to keep your head above the water or else you might just inhale a little bit of the bad stuff and choke on your own subconscious as you fell to the bottom of the pit. She’d promoted the building of those walls that I’d erected on the rims of my own little ocean and although I’d gotten used to it over the years, forgetting it over at the back of my mind as I continued on with what was right in front of me, only so much could be kept out. There was only so much that I could stand up against without wanting to vomit over myself as I felt myself choking on acid-like water that sat mere feet away.

Sitting on the couch, watching my own dad walk away with a phone connected to his ear, was like watching a hurricane itself slam itself into a wall created long ago leaving the barebones exposed to the open air. This was all getting beyond anything an eleven year old should’ve been exposed to. The feeling of being knocked so hard off of my feet felt like falling into my own little pool and letting my body drown itself in the chlorine and allowing the rush of water to fill my lings – replacing the polluted air I’d gotten so used to and so desperately clung onto.

I watched him leave the room and make his way to the kitchen. His phone was back up to his ear the second he’d given up the boy’s name in a monotonous tone and it was back to talking, his voice a masked tint, into the receiver. Sitting on the couch, I could see the waver in his voice as his hands fidgeted along the hems of his sleeves and fiddled with the boxes stacked high along the baseboard of the kitchen counter without even processing the words leaving his mouth. Years of watching him, always on the phone and dealing with other people, made it easy to find the kinks in the way that my dad worked. A part of me recognized how uncertain he was acting, how confused he seemed of his own actions and even under the feet of water growing above me as I sat there, staring, I could tell he was as horrified as I was about the boy locked behind the large door just down the hall.

His name is Jean and his eyes are the lightest shade of brown and his hair is almost like mine except the top is definitely a shade a blonde. He’d seemed extremely upset over the outcomes of the day. It was warranted, of course, but the rage that had seared itself into me was so terrifyingly heated that it had thrown e even farther down that sea of guilt. The look in his eyes still burned in the back of my mind as I stared at the place my dad had been standing, choosing to rather make his way to stand directly in the middle of the kitchen where his voice stifled over the empty cabinets.

The faint words of “money” and “feds” roster themselves through the din of thoughts rolling through my head and it takes everything in me to focus on the here and now and the fact that I’m surrounded by boxes full of our lives haphazardly tucked into every corner of the entryway and living room. Our lives put into torn, old bags and damp-looking boxes that threatened to spill its content – to spill our lives – out onto the floor without any care in the world. Boxes could rip and no one would feel the guilt ripping through its chest as it dumped fragile plates and personal mementos onto hard-tiled floors. Boxes have no feelings and they wouldn’t care just as much as anyone else in this house. No one would care if a tiny teacup were to shatter into little ant-sized pieced when there were somehow bigger things to worry about. Bigger things that were treated like the pink elephant in the room. Seen and in plain sight alongside the mess of luggage and small thuds coming from down the hall yet never fully disclosed because “everyone has secrets Marco” and “you’ll understand when you’re older”.

Whatever dad was getting them into was a dangerous game and I could feel the waves rush over me as I fought my way to stay afloat but this game was showing to be a lot more than even he’d expected. It was probably going to involve a lot of close calls and the only way to face it head-on would be to never turn my back and let it slip my mind that mom had taught me to swim for a reason before she left me forever.

Taking a moment to breathe, I stand up deeming my own dad useless and stuck in his own mind as he mumbled curses over the phone and lengthy apologies the next second and make my way to the closest stack of our lives piled near the small set of bow windows framed with old dusty, scratched whitewood. The house was very old fashioned. A single-story set up with the narrow hallway that connected the three rooms and single bathroom to the front of the house took up over half of the small plot of land. The living room was small and under the clutter of bags it felt like the pool of guilt flowing inside me was being squished and pushed further into me with no room to expand and lighten the pressure building. The small space half-covered in old musty carpeting while the other half was taken over in old hardwood flooring that led to the cracked tiles in the kitchen only allowed so much room around the large leather sectional and small television set that occupied the corner across from the front door. Everything felt too large for the space and claustrophobic in the tiny room and it just furthered the feeling that I was so small in this place and I quickly turned away from it all, choosing to stare down at the boxes labeled with a large “K” in what was probably the last drying Sharpie in the old apartment we used to reside in.

Grabbing the bags that looked like they contained things that I’d claimed as my own for years before, I made myself more familiar to the walk down the hall to what is my room. The lights in the hall tended to flicker and it especially did so every time one of the large rolling bags I was dragging behind me knocked around on its broken wheels and banged against the wall. Every thump of the bag keeping me on my toes as I made to stand in front of my bedroom’s door. The room was small as well. Right across the hall from the bathroom and off the living room, it felt so planned. Like there was thought put into the distance I would always need to maintain with the door at the end of the hall. I would be kept far from the waves but it couldn’t keep the lapping waves from slowly grazing against my feet as I stood in the doorway of my room peeking around the frame at the number of locks on the door intervening between Jean and I. The feeling of distress growing as I keep my eyes on the stillness of the door wishing that it could throw itself open letting a certain blond boy out to help him make this strange new place a home. But the thought is dumb and I know it’s dumb so I shake the ideas away and focus on dragging the bag further into the room and dropping myself onto the ground next to it to start rummaging through the mess inside.

The hodgepodge of clothes and books and knickknacks from my room are thrown about with little care for its safely when I finally get the zipper to unstick itself from the thick frayed fabric of the bag and it showed just how spastic dad had made it when he told me we needed to pack up our entire lives just to take a day trip to the park on our way out. I’d never had much over the few books mom had left and the second hand clothes from Goodwill that dad sometimes brought home on good days. The few little toys from when I was young and souvenirs from trips never personally taken were strewn about so close to breaking that I was glad I had enough sweaters to cradle the few things I owned. I pulled everything out, stacking them in their like piles and putting them up onto the dusty shelves in the room. The bed was already made and set across the doorway under a small window that resembled the one that had been in Jean’s room only just the bit larger. And without the heavy metal bars glinting against the setting sun on the other side. Sliding my hands against the sheets I found the quality was much better, probably less itchy, than the one Jean had been dropped onto and it takes a lot to forget the blond boy again from the second time to focus on clearing out the bags before dad realized I wasn’t moping around the living room anymore.

Within enough time, I’m able to empty the bag and place everything in its assumed right place before dad showed up in the doorway of the room, phone stuffed into the pockets of his worn out jeans and frown slightly less threatening as he looks over the state of the room. I stand on my feet to face him, hands behind my back, waiting for him to say something and he seems to notice my rigid stance as he forces a small plastic smile onto his face and speaks with a softer, absolute bullshitted tone. Everything behind it so fake that I can taste the scent of a factory label soaked into the saliva in my mouth. “Well look at you. I’m gonna go get some food. Keep unboxing if you’re so bored but don’t you dare step anywhere near that door. I’ll take care of the kid when I get back.”

I nod my head at his already retreating back and make my way to follow him out to the living room. I make to stand near a box, pretending to examine its contents as I watch him pull on his heavy work boots and grab his huge set of keys off the kitchen counter. He passes me as he walks towards the door and it must be those waves again drowning out the vision of everyone in this house leaving them blind but he doesn’t respond to the small smile I shoot his way as he instead slams the door shit behind him as the lingering scent of cigarettes passes by. The crunch of his boots on dry grass and fallen leaves can be heard through the crack under the door and I lose myself in listening to his fading footsteps and hearing it turn into the sound of an old motor sputtering to life before I catch myself and go back to worrying over boxes.

I sift through the top bunch and find the sparse dishes that usually occupied our cabinets back home stacked on top of each other, layers of newspaper as their only protection from destruction. Grabbing a small stack, I begin the process of shelving and reorganizing an entire room’s worth of items stuck in my own thoughts as my hands work automatically. The bang of something solid hitting against a wall knocks me off my feet yet thankfully I save the row of coffee mugs looped between my fingers. Fingers that slowly put down the mugs onto the counter but continue shaking as I grip them onto the edge of the counter. That constant reminder that I’m not all that alone in the house is a new experience that I’m not so used to yet it makes everything inside me race with panic yet grounds me as I turn towards the direction of the hall.

Time passes slowly but I soon move on from the kitchen now with shelves stocked without meager dishes and turn back towards the living room where the slowly lessening amount of boxes are left waiting to be dealt with. The occasional banding on the walls rang through the house but after an hour of trying to ignore it over the boxes it stopped altogether. I didn’t know whether to take it as a blessing or to recognize it as lost hope that stung harder than anything but either way I tossed it to the back of my mind.

The sounds of keys jingling outside the front door brings my attention up away from the box of DVDs I’d been rummaging through and for a second panic flooded through me again as I watched the doorknob turn in slow-mo and listened to the creak of the hinges on rusty bolts. I can fear my breath falter in my lings as I wait for the worse and the sight of my father walking in slightly dazed framed by the dark sky outside does little to relax that thumping in my heart. He wobbles through the entrance, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the entire house and shaking the bones of the house as well as me still standing by the kitchen counter, one hand in an open box. He stumbles for a second as he plops himself at the lumpy couch in front of the television and I stare at him, ultimately waiting for him to say something.

His gruff voice laden with alcohol muffles over the arm thrown over his face and as I stand there, unresponding, at his incoherency it’s like the tension sparks to life and crackles across the room to lash out at me when he speaks up again – much lauder and more volatile. “Did you hear me boy? I said you better have taken the boxes of stuff with my shit to my room before I get my ass off this couch. Get on now!”

The loud roar of being dismissed and sent to complete a task sets me back into motion and I hurriedly make my way to the boxes labeled with large X’s and drag them by its flaps across the greasy floor towards the end of the hallway. I get as close to standing a foot from the doorway of dad’s room when the faint thumping registers from further down the hall. The curiosity pushes me forward, closer to the large, sturdy door and reaching towards the locks on an absentminded whim.

The sound of loud coughing and dad clearing his throat drops my raised hand and backing quickly away from the door. Leave it alone. Don’t let it drag you down. And besides, dad said that he’d take care of the boy so there was no need to throw myself into the room. Backtracking my steps, feeling like the entire day’s just been me doing the same actions, evading the inevitable over and over again trying to stay away from the blond, I fall back and pull the last of the boxes through the door and shut it as I walk out. The thumping is still there, shaking the walls and floorboards, slightly less consistent with less gusto then before and the guilt spikes back through me after every step I make back towards the living room. He’s fiddling with one of the boxes as I walk around the corner and the second he sees me, with a grunt of ascent, he bumbles his way past me and slams the door shut behind him with a quick, passing “sleep” as a goodnight. The second the room’s doused back into the numbing silence it’s like my stomach’s exploded into its own little mariachi band as it rumbles through the silence. Dad didn’t come back with any groceries and I doubted that it’d even crossed his mind over the buzz of liquor at whatever bar he’d ended up at. Hopefully there would be a dented box of canned foods that I’d skipped over while shelving that I could stiff down my mouth without having to heat it. The soft sounds of thumping acting as background music as I shuffled around until every part of me froze and my blood ran cold. Jean would probably be hungry too. Oh god. What if he’d been starving this whole time and that’s why he’d been pounding at the wall? What if he’d had to use the bathroom? The bucket dad had thrown in there couldn’t possibly be for its entitled use.

Grabbing the keys haphazardly thrown back onto the counter and grabbing an old box of Trix cereal, I make my way quietly on the balls of my feet towards the end of the hall. The floors creak under my weight every few feet and I remind myself to remember the footfalls that land silently on the hardwood. This whole house was going to be a memory exercise on walking on eggshells and as I get closer to the door of dad’s room, I make sure to take as much time as necessary to restrict the noises from escaping the floor too loudly. I pause in front of the doorway, listening for any signs of consciousness and I relax when I hear the loud thunder from across the door’s panels. Edging away from the door and keeping sure that my feet fall on the panels of wood that look less likely to creak, I get closer to the large, locked door. The thumping had stopped and I hope Jean hadn’t suffered the worse and had rather fallen asleep through his ministrations against the cheap wall panels. Hopefully not in his own pool of piss or vomit. Sliding the keys into my fingers, making sure my palm gripped tight to the lot of keys and kept it from chiming in the silence, I steadied myself in front of the multiple locks and listened for any disturbances on the other side of the door. Hearing silence, I raised my hand and slid the key into its place and turning my hand as slowly as possible to reduce unnecessary noise, I was rewarded with a faint click followed by reassuring silence. I continued onto the next set of locks, moving down and making sure to check for rustling from dad’s door and soon enough I found myself standing in front of a fully unlocked door – no barriers or restrictions or walls keeping me away from falling into a void. Grabbing the nob takes about a second full of all anxiety and the grip I’ve had on the cereal box tightens and dents the cardboard as I squeeze the cold metal. The taste of chlorine mixed with the taste of metal, its tang intermingling in the back of my throat, slowly fills my mouth as my heart races over my turning wrist. The lock clicks out of place and with the slowest creak of the hinges and a heavy weight to pull against gravity, the door falls open just the slightest, lighting a dark room lit only slightly by the rising moon outside the peripherals the small windows across the bed allowed.

The bed itself was empty. Sheets having been rumpled from someone that looked to have been jumping on were pushed to the side and nearly falling off the bed. The little bit of light shone through didn’t reveal much and as I leaned my head through searching for a sign of a body, box still gripped tight in my hand, the door nearly banged against the stiff body of Jean against the wall. The small thump of knocking into his sock-clad feet made my jump the slightest and the small clink of the key in my hand quickly stiffens my movements as I listen for any sign of motion on the other side of dad’s door. Meeting silence I make to step into the room and shut the door behind me as I look down at light brown eyes staring intently back at me.

His eyes were rimmed red, the skin around his eye sockets swollen and tip of the nose red and irritated as he sneered up at me. His body was slumped fully on the wall on his side, multiple books from the tiny bookshelf across the door scattered around his feet lain open with pages hanging by the tiniest piece of paper. The room was a mess and the faint smell off pee lingered across the room by the window where the bucket say open to the air. My heart dropped as I watched the thin chain links wrapped around the cuff on the blond boy’s ankle as he shifted to sit on his bottom to stare directly up at me, hands still lingering over the dented ends of a book.

His voice is scratchy, croaking under the strain that I can only assume is from not sipping at the small water bottle that stood unopen on the bookshelf that must’ve been put there by dad at some point. It’s quiet, him understanding that it’s likely my sneaky movements entailed I wasn’t allowed to be in the room in the first place. Taking a second to silently slide the keys to the room into my pocket, I grip onto the Trix box as his voice mutters through the small room. “Finally decided to see if I actually pissed myself?”

My jaw clenched on reaction, his words mulling through my head as my eyes darted across his face and around the room. Any idea of what to say flies out of my mind as my mouth stays shut to avoid saying something stupid. It’s only after what feels like minutes of being on the receiving end of harsh eyes that I try to sound calm and collected. “I-I just thought you might be hungry. Dad’s asleep and-”

“So he is your dad then?” Jean mutters quietly as his eyes analyze every part of me as if his words were only meant for him to hear. The way he blew air out his mouth in annoyance showed that he didn’t like how it had come out louder than he’d preferred but it was out and in the open and it nearly threw me for a loop as I watched him squint up at me in the dim light.

“Yeah. He’s my dad and he said he’d bring back food but I guess he got caught up and forgot. But I brought-”

“I don’t want your charity. I’m fucking chained to the floor without shoes on having just pissed in a metal can and you think I want your stale cereal?” Jean practically spits back up at me. His eyes are shining and it’s either from the spite dripping from his voice or he’s getting upset with himself; either way, I turn my head away from him as he takes a second to catch his breath.

Once his breathing has noticeably leveled out, I turn back and his eyes are still on me but the small glances down at the box in my hands is enough for me to figure out what would be best. I set the cereal down by his feet and he flinches just a bit, recoiling his feet under himself, but relaxes again when I step back towards the door. The glaze of tawny eyes set above a raging fire don’t leave me and there’s another emotion behind them that I can’t really place in the dark but I hope that it isn’t anywhere close to misplaced anger towards me. The thought that I would have anything to do with why Jean was linked to the floor was just wrong. “I’ll come back tomorrow with more after dad leaves.” He doesn’t show any signs that he hears me as his face stays nonchalant over my words. His eyelashes fluttering onto his cheeks don’t even stutter as he stares up at me waiting for something that I don’t know what to give and it may be a trick of the dark light but the remnants of tears seem to be stuck onto the tips of them.

And with that I pull the door open, making sure the hinges don’t let too much noise, and I back out of the room with Jean’s eyes still trained on my retreating form. Pulling the door shut and grabbing the keys in my pocket in a fist I set about locking the door, taking the time to make sure the every lock that I’d undone were set back into their place. The weight of the metal keys, over six of them, are like heavy anchors in my hand and I can feel it dragging me down even further under any certain repercussions that would occur if my fingerprints were to ever be found near this door and it’s so much of me trying to stay light as I clench them in my fist. The spikes of metal digging into my palm keeps me above that dampening level and it keeps my feet steady on the ground. I lean my head against the frame and I can feel myself shaking as I take a breath in and out but it’s all I can do for now as the sound of dad snoring resonates in the back of my mind. I need to leave this place. Get away from Jean before dad realizes I’m standing outside the door where every time I breathe it’s like it rebounds off and echoes into the dark house.

My feet guide me back towards the living room, still slightly a mess from empty boxes and bags still needing to be unpacked but as I look over everything I can feel it all consuming me. Just looking into the open box left on the couch is too much, the stacks of DVDs that I had no idea whatsoever where to put was too much to try to process and it was like watching myself move on my own as my feet sent me towards the small bedroom off the living room. My butt hit the hard mattress of the bed; a second later, my head followed as I curled in on myself. Bringing my knees up to my chest and feeling my breathe knocking itself into my ribcage the only strong rhythm I can feel over numbing fingers. Bothering to even change out of my clothes felt dirty and irresponsible. I couldn’t think about clean clothes when the idea that Jean was still on the floor of the far off room peeing into a metal bucket and nibbling on old cereal out of box in his day clothes. Clothes that looked to cost more than my own entire bundle of clothes that now sat on the shelves in the closet or were stuffed into the small drawers of the standing chest next to the door.

The rush of the warm summer wind sounds outside the window next to my bed – a sound that mom had used to relax me during the longer nights when the sounds of the television in the living room intermingled with the voices of men conversing over dented cans of beer – and it couldn’t seem to comfort me now as it had wrapped in thin, sylphlike, warm arms. In a new place that didn’t have the small signs that made it feel like home. The etching on the wood of the doorways didn’t hold the familiarity they had back at the apartment. There wasn’t a story to read in the small dents that had been in the wood of the doorframes. It was all foreign – everything was foreign and neither dad nor I belonged here. But dad wasn’t even the same anymore. He was more intense in his actions, his movements something that I had grown used to but somehow different in that it didn’t feel right. It wasn’t right and it felt like I was drowning in things that I could never have prepared for.

It takes hours but I finally manage to shut my eyes against the light of the moon outside and I get those few hours to rest – to forget.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updates will be a monthly thing. First weekend of every month because school is a lot of colorguard is a lot and writing this fic in general is a lot. 
> 
> I hope you like this chapter. It's a rather filler chapter because I'm still scoping out the scenes between Marco and his dad and with Marco and Jean. Jean's chapter will be next so look out for that in a couple weeks. I read the comments that you guys have sent and oh my god I spent days just crying to my friends because you guys are the sweetest and took it as seriously as I'd hoped you all would. I know the style for this fic is different [considering they're 11 years old] but I wanted the sophistication to contrast a lot with the way the I have them speaking aloud. I hope it doesn't throw anyone off but please leave comments telling me what you like and don't like or are confused about. It'll make me super happy. 
> 
> ALSO I have a [a beta](http://archiveofourown.org/users/acemockingjay/pseuds/acemockingjay/works) and Nick is the bees knees and you should follow him and his AO3. His fic is the bombdotcom 
> 
>  
> 
> [my tumblr](http://mamaarachne.tumblr.com/)


	4. Artemisia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Degrading. Everything he's been forced to comply to is degrading and his father would've scoffed at him for following orders and his mother - oh his mother must be so worried.
> 
>  **Artemsia**. | _noun_. | absense

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: some things might be a little hard to take. this fic deals a lot with abuse and negligence and Marco receives it as well so please be aware

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

How fucking stupid could I possibly get? This was becoming the limits of borderline “Jean has lost his mind” and was starting to edge towards the cliff of “his conceited, self-absorption will be high ruination and I hope he jumps” and god was that already horribly depressing in and of itself it could make anyone sick. It wasn’t even about being mad at the people that walked the smelly halls outside the door. It’s just about me. Me being mad at myself for being so damn selfish and fucking shit up for myself. None of this was anyone’s fault but myself. It wasn’t even that kid’s fault but god did that face boil everything inside of me. I could feel it lighting and coaxing a hotter, wilder fire inside of me every time those damned freckles veered into my vision.

And it wasn’t even like I could somehow escape that feeling. I was surrounded by that boy’s presence and the reminder every few seconds that he was out there banging around the house doing god knows what; just adding tinder to that growing flame.

Then there was the guilt that seemed spread through me; reaching from the base of spine and soaking into my bone marrow out into every part of me as it weighted heavy on my body. It felt difficult to move – the heaviness over my shoulders and on my chest making it hard to breath. Mom would be worried sick over me and even though I know I pretended like I didn’t care – like I didn’t have any fucks to give on what my mother thought about my actions – worrying her wasn’t the desired plan. Maybe giving her a little fright when she found her only son’s room empty but relaxing her once she found me swinging on those rusty metal chain links, feet floating into the air in front of me was the planned ending. Everything had been planned that day to end with me going home with a slightly upset mother but entirely grateful mom who would coddle me and love me and – I just fucking ruined it. I ruined it for everyone the second I let my guard down. The second that I stepped out of the house knowing I’d forgotten to take a jacket with me. Years of mom hounding over me to grab a jacket and the guilt of not even doing so little was what sat on my chest as I lay here on a bed too hard to ever rival the one at home.

The sun is still up as I lay there, mind barely even working, and I wonder just how far gone my levels of cognition are since they drugged me up and stuck me in the backseat of a beat-up truck next to some smelly little kid. Granted the kid very much looked to be the same age as me with the little view I had of his face while being carried and dumped into the room. Kids were always assholes but not even a word from this one and I already knew I wasn’t going to like him. The was that he pretended to know nothing or actually didn’t know nothing about what was going on just infuriated me more and more I thought about it.

How the fuck could someone not know what they’re own dad was doing? Especially when that thing they were doing was kidnapping a small child from a public park? A park that was usually full of babysitter and nannies and somehow, in some way, they’d managed to time my arrival and the emptiness of a park open to the general public, placed in a highly dense populated neighborhood where the rich got richer and the cheap got arrested was beyond my grasp of the world. If the view of the truck from the inside had anything to say, the outside wasn’t likely to have been any more graceless and the thought that these lunatics had gotten away with just driving into the general vicinity of the high and mighty was truly remarkable. On busier days, I’d watched many people give dirty looks to any and all electric vehicles that decided to drive alongside the heavy duty Maserati we were used to accommodating the roads with.

These people got away with so much in such a short amount of time and all of it was still a blur to me but somehow it felt like it lasted a lifetime as I watched every part of it happen in grinding slow motion. From being dragged into the back and being thrown against the rough leathery seats digging into my back; it was all imprinted forever into my head.

There wasn’t the appeal of a piece of candy to lure me in like a dumb four year old. It was all cut and clean. A kidnapping. True and blue I was picked off the playground and taken to what could possibly be a murder house what with how the room smelled intoxicatingly familiar like the scent of antiseptic from mom’s hospital room mixed thoroughly with drying paint that needed a couple more days to soak into the floorboards and plaster on the walls.

The smell of it all was starting to give me a headache but there would be no way in hell to get me into sipping on that grimy little water bottle that someone had perched onto the edge of the tiny bookshelf next to the bed. I’d rather let the back of my throat scratch its own self to death, leaving little red line marks down the back of it, than drink water from the enemy lines. The chance that it could be poisoned to make these evil people’s jobs that much easier was not satisfaction that I approved of and handing it to them wasn’t about to happen so early in the game.

These people chose to kidnap probably the most insistent child they could ever find and that was fine by me. They wanted me to fall prey to their little water bottle game? Not going to happen. They want me to sleep on this rickety piece of scrap metal? Hell to the no. You want me to keep the books all aligned as they are by size and shape on the bent-over bookshelf? You bet your fucking ass I’m going to ruin it for everyone.

Digging my hands into the thin mattress thrown against the frame, the springs creaking, I sit up against the wall, stretching against the cold concrete and cinders, letting my spine realign itself from where it’s been scrunched in on itself for what felt like hours in that backseat mess. I let my breathing even itself out from where it was apparently rushing itself out of my lungs, the feeling of pressure still very much pressed against my ribcage as I try to stare at a focus point and calm myself. 

I drag myself, fingers clawing into the rumpled sheets that were already haphazardly thrown onto the bed as I make my way towards the edge of the small twin bed. It’s a tiny space but it feels like a mile as my nails catch in the threads and snag along the distance of the bed. It takes a while but my feet finally touch ground. Only clad in socks, the cold of the concrete flooring is cold enough in the summer heat filling the room to send a strong chill straight through my spine making me shiver sitting on the bed. The heat in the room is still blazing, the little window locked up and closed to the outside world does little to keep out most of the heat but it does do enough to keep me from sweating bullets in the afternoon scorch. But it does make the smells that much more radioactive as time passes and I stay there, sitting in my own pooling sweat stains etching into the mattress and sheets, inhaling the stench of paint and cleaning fluids.

With a sudden rush of energy, that fire that’s been building inside of me fueling my motions, I get myself to stand on my feet. It’s wobbly at first, my head feeling heavy on top of my shoulders throwing me off balance just the slightest, but I’m up and staring down at the stack of books left sitting on the small shelves.

It didn’t matter what anyone said about how good and evil weren’t black and white and easy to decipher. All I could see was red and the rush of fire lighting my fingertips as they clung onto the spines of books left forgotten. That push to feel the solidness between my fingers and finding that anchor to cling onto sends books against the thin door frame. The sound of it thudding against the heavy wall, resounding pounds against cement, lifts that weight slowly off my shoulders. It feels like the heaviness is slowly leaving me with every book that hits against the wall and it lightens me just the slightest but that pressure is still resting on my shoulders.

Hours pass, the rage that had fueled my outburst leaving me leaning fully against the wall next to the door clinging to a copy of some children’s book and banging it against the framing. The tears that had escaped had dried long ago, the empty tear tracks etched on my cheeks drying and crackling every time my mouth tried to open into a silent scream. My throat was reaching beyond dry and I could feel the way it cracked violently whenever I tried to take in a breath.

And of course to counteract the dryness in my throat, I had to piss like a motherfucker.

The sun outside was dipping into the horizon; the skies above turning deep shades of purples mixed with oranges and reds. Colors I feel like I’ve never noticed them taking before. Colors that emphasize the smallness I feel locked behind closed doors and cement walls, forced to intake acidic scents as my throat threatens to scratch itself into the next millennium. It was a grand gesture on the world’s part and here I was, the tiniest piece in the world outside forced to stay quiet and small. The smallness didn’t apply further to the way that my bladder seemed to be pushing into my pelvis.

A bathroom was not a luxury I was sure to be receiving anytime soon. There was no way I was going to piss my own pants when I knew very well that I wouldn’t be able to change out of them for who knows how long. If I even made it that long. But first there was the issue with the pee squeezing out of me.

Almost like a sign from the devil himself, the glint of the metal bucket reached the corners of my peripheral vision as I sat there licking at the salty residue sliding further down my face. A near-silent whisper scratches out of my throat, letters dragging like steel on sand and the energy it takes to get the air out of my lungs to make the words is enough leave me breathless. “Fuck.”

I won’t allow their satisfaction with dragging my ass towards the damn bucket. Clawing my way along the length of the wall, I’m able to form some semblance of standing on my feet before I make my way, wobble towards the rusty can. It feels like I’m an animal, pissing into the can and it must say something about humans and the way that we over aggrandize the human biological system to create throne-like shitholes for ourselves when all it really is, is a place to dump a load or two for the sake of reducing repetitive cleaning. Dragging my feet closer to the bucket, I can feel the levels of dehydration in me, knowing that in a couple minutes I’d be inhaling a different kind of rancid smell that I couldn’t even blame on anyone but myself. But, no. This wasn’t my fault either. It’s not my fault that I’m forced to release the driest ounce of pee I’ve ever dumped into a bucket.

If I’m going to have to do this, I’m doing it just as grand as any piece of royalty who needs a new hobby. Dragging the bucket across the floor, the metal scratching into the cement floors, I grip my hands tight on the window’s wooden ledge above my head and stare at the bars that are too high to look through properly. Staring holes into the walls, bucket neatly placed between my legs, my hands make their way to the latch of my pants and with a small click they open and I drag them down a little and wiggle myself out of them.

Standing there, one hand on my junk and the other gripping onto the wall in front of me, it’s like everything flashes in front of my face. The fury of degradation and the hurt of having nothing to fucking wipe my hands on after I shake myself back into my pants. The urge to kick the rancid bucket against the wall fires itself up inside me but I stoke it down with the knowledge that sitting in a pile of piss would be worse than sitting next to a bucket of the stuff and I drag myself back away from the thing back towards the door.

There was no way I was going to sit on the bed. The thing didn’t do anything to quell the aching in my spine and laying down would just be another step in going along with their orders. Waddling, legs going half asleep in the water-deprivation, I shoot a glare towards the bottle of water sitting there, mocking me. I ignore it, letting the coolness of the hinges under the fingers travel through my body as I lean heavily against the wall and resume my thumping against the plaster with the book.

The cover of it is a shade that follows the scale of vomit to brussel sprout green but it’s a familiar tone of color that sparks memories of reading it in the dim lighting of my room as I drowned out the noises outside my door. Flipping it in my hands, The Giving Tree looks back up at me, the bent tree offering a shiny red apple to a young boy gracing the slightly bent hardcover. The story comes back to me slowly as my hands still in their movements. The story about a tree that gave so much to this boy and basically raised him figuratively as the boy lived a life taking it for granted until one day it was gone. The boy had been left with nothing when that tree died, memories of selfishness and guilt over his shoulders as he stared at the stump that was left in its wake.

The guilt and anger that filled me spilled itself again as tears started forming into the corners of my eyes.

Mom used to read to me those nights that she could make it into my room.

I’m wiping my eyes, red palms smearing hot tears across my face and through my nose to keep the snot from dribbling onto my lap, when I hear the sounds of footsteps. I’d been too out of focus to notice the changing sounds on the other side of the door, but these steps were getting and closer towards the door. Light in its heaviness compared to the thuds I remembered from years of shying away from doors and heavy yet liftable object. It’s probably the kid. Not like that man would give two shits about the mess I made in the bucket. The kid was a nuisance but even I could see that there had been some false sympathy in his eyes.

The kid – Marco, I think, walks cautiously into the room. His shoulders suggest that there’s a chance that the old man doesn’t know about his current whereabouts and Marco’s on a recon mission of sorts. Probably trying to make friends off a future enemy. He’s saying something – something about his dad and whatever but it’s all white noise as I let my eyes glare daggers into his face. The few times I response it’s subconscious; feeling my mouth move sarcastically and letting out snippy and biting remarks and watching how the boy seems to coil further into himself.

It’s horrible and I know it’s not the proper way to interact with people but the circumstances don’t really follow the guidelines of normal. I let the boy mumble along, my attention focused on those freckles and just how the hell did he manage to get so many on his face alone. Those damned freckles. It would probably takes days to may them out on a piece of paper and hopefully I wouldn’t be here that long to do so. Over the length of the boy’s rambling, the little dots on his face disappeared under the layer of red skin and a quick glance up to flitting eyes brings a smirk to my face. The kid is afraid of me. Good.

I can feel my breathe leaving me as I watch the way he starts glancing around the room, searching for something to say when I started to grasp onto the few bits of oxygen that could reach my bloodstream. The sight of the box in his hands is what elicits the smallest gasp out of me without letting Marco notice the change in my demeanor. It’s been so long since I’ve eaten anything. I didn’t even catch a piece of toast mom had been setting for breakfast when I’d left to meet my demise. The feeling of my stomach rumbling was traveling up my body and into vocal range and I needed to quench the damned feeling before the bile could reach up to the tips of my tongue. It was that nausea you felt when you’d forgiven hours of starving yourself over something else more important to do and gotten home to equal or lesser hours spent sleeping off the wooziness or standing in the kitchen while mom rushed around trying to find a bucket for you to dry heave into.

I must’ve been drooling because during the little internal war I’d been having inside my head, a box was soon being placed by my feet by freckled hands. I flinched away at the sudden movement above me, an instinctual action. But I relax when Marco soon enough backs away from me; his hands are in full view, reaching back towards the door handle behind him. It’s a heavy-hearted acceptance but the second the door closes behind Marco and I hear the locks clicking back into their places, I reach forward – lunging practically – at the box by my cold feet and stare at the open flap of the Trix box.

This could be a test. I fall into this pit of having to rely on these people to stay alive but I didn’t want to die. Not really. Falling prey to their little mind games would be horrible but the primal instincts to feed was winning out of me. I needed to eat something before I passed out and never woke up.

I dig my hands into the box, my hands crinkling in the plastic that held the old, gummy cardboard-like cereal as the faint sound of the door closing down the hall flows in one ear and out the other. Grabbing a few pieces and stuffing them in my mouth, savoring the way the papery pieces seem to sit and melt in my mouth, proves to not be enough and I let my hand scoop further into the box grabbing a palm-full of the stuff and practically pushing it into my face. Second word of the day slips out as I let the grainy cereal sit in my mouth for a little while as I try to choke it down. “Fuck it.”

Throwing a hand to the wind, I work my hand like a conveyer belt, shoveling cereal into my mouth and reaching back into the box and bringing it back to my mouth. It’s a robotic motion that lasts for as long as it takes to empty out the entire box. It’s enough to get my stomach to feel that lie that I’m actually full and not on the verge of vomiting back the plastic carcass of fake marshmallows.

\---

Sleep comes to me at some point; exhaustion running me literally into the ground as I find myself waking up to the cool floor from the early morning under my cheek. Slapping my tongue against the roof of my mouth is worse than I could’ve imagined. The entirety of my mouth felt like it was sticking to itself as I tried to move the heavy weight in my mouth around, trying to catch the taste of the backs of my teeth. All I come back with is the taste of dryness, cereal festering in the gaps between my teeth and saliva molding itself onto the roof and sides of my mouth.

I tried to sit up – make myself lean back against the wall – but the soreness that shot itself across my legs and the numbness I felt from my calves because of my legs’ positioning stopped me for a second. The cold floor under me is a lot, chilling my hands as I slide them to get along to the wall and I can feel that chill running through my bones and it just feels so alone. I should be wrapped in sheets and comforters on my soft-down bed nowhere near concrete floors. The worst should have been the feeling of designer hardwoods under my toes as I waddled my way into the adjoining bathroom and fumbled to try to find my toothbrush without knocking over the hairdryer I never went and put away. The heat would’ve been on this early in the morning to keep the house at a constant temperature that kept mom’s back aches at bay.

A nice heating pad against the base of my neck and back would do wonders for me now as I sit there looking around the room with nothing else to do. I’d dropped the cereal box back near the door at some point, the cardboard dented and empty of any hopes to fix the emptiness inside me. Smacking my mouth open and closed doesn’t do anything to fix the dryness that’s starting to fill the room again as the sun rises against the horizon.

The water is still placed on the bookshelf. Sitting there; mocking me and the fact that complying was the last thing I wanted to do. But I still did it. I dragged my pathetic ass to that rickety bookshelf and slammed my hands down on the worn wood and clutched at the bottle in my weak fingers. I make myself open the cap, setting it down on the shelf, and bring the bottle up to my lips.

It’s like nirvana. The coolness that the bottle maintained from the early morning reached far inside my throat and did the most in making sure it rehydrated every part of the my mouth the best that it could with the little tablespoon of water I allowed myself to intake. Just the bit of it was like an oasis in a sea of nothing and emptiness and I had to shut my mouth to keep the moan from dribbling water down my chin as I let it swish and sit around my teeth, letting it wash away the bitter tastes of morning.

I was capping the bottle, leaning heavily onto the shelf when I hears the door outside my door slam open on squeaky hinges. I freeze where I’m standing listening to the sounds outside as I make out voices – mainly the burly voice of the man from yesterday – echoing around the house. I remember just how volatile that voice had been last night under the obvious weight of alcohol I could recognize from more than a foot of cement and multiple locks. Intoxication wasn’t a new thing to me and the way that words had slurred and doors had banged against the doorframes were familiar and unintimidating and made my way to sit on the bed, letting my legs relax for just that minute of standing I’d endured for water.

The sound of the front door slamming shut after a bout of silence resounds around the room and it’s moments later after a while of mumbling that I hear the locks outside my door clicking off place and sliding off its marks.

It’s the kid. His dad must’ve gone out for the second time in less than 12 hours to restock the beer or alcohol cooler or whatever the fuck these people like to drown themselves in. The sparkle of brown eyes, peeking from the rim of the heavy door is anything but calming as he quietly walks into the room, a bowl of some kind of food in his hands. Getting a little bit closer, the violent shade of yellow like it belonged in a highlighter pen and the weird shapes of cartoon characters I remembered watching when I was like six stood out in the small, plastic, blue bowl.

Spongebob? You’ve got to be kidding me. The childishness that plays off this kid in that one second is emphasized even further as Marco’s entire posture seems to shrink into itself and become smaller the longer he stands in the doorway, staring at the floor. His limbs magnetize themselves to his sides, slinking back into his core as he shakes visibly clenching the bowl to keep it from tipping over.

The door closes behind him with a loud thud, the rumble of metal on metal echoing through the cement for a second before dissipating into their silent standoff. Marco still looking down at his worn shoes and me forgetting for a second that I didn’t have a pair to relate to and staring at the freckles that line itself across the bridge of his nose. The boy standing stock still at the door doesn’t do a thing and I let my eyes roam for a second in the afternoon light, away from the warm-looking bowl of food. I turn them up to the ceiling, the cracks and ridges on the edge of breaking and I can see it there too. Those damn pictures my mind’s imagination makes involuntarily.

Marco clears his throat quietly, the gruff stickiness of saliva clinging to the insides of his mouth parroting mine just an hour ago. He’s still staring down the nonexistent dust bunnies as his voice breaks on his first words. “Dad said to bring you something to eat and I-I found a box of macaroni so um.” His voice trails as I stare directly at him – his demeanor still on edge as the spoon placed in the bowl titters on the rim. “He-he’s out doing work with his boss so eat.”

The boy’s gaze never reaches above the edges of bed thrown against the wall and there’s a pit in my stomach that wants to see the boy’s face but I push the feeling of wanting to talk out of my head. This wasn’t the time to talk, I didn’t know if there ever would be a time to talk with that lone boy. Instead I keep myself against the wall, quiet as my back turns cold from the contact and assessing the fidgeting Marco’s feet go through as he shuffles forward a bit. He sets the bowl onto the end of the bed closest to the door – the spoon wobbling slightly in the gelatinous texture of cardboard cheese and noodles and lets his hand drop to play with the fringe of his frayed shirt.

It must’ve been the angle but I notice the appearance of a second bowl held in Marco’s other hand, the spoon sticking straight up from where it was dug into the pile of macaroni. He seems to sense the way I stare at the bowl in his hands and not at my own serving because he pulls it forward, cradling the blue plastic to his chest with both hands as he looks up at me with earnestness in his eyes.

It simmers away in the three seconds of locking eyes. Three seconds where I can feel that energy pooling inside of me wanting to reach out and make the boy stay with me. To get him to sit and tell him what’s happening and help him out of this place. Those three seconds of false hope dim as the light seems of leave Marco’s eyes and the cracks that spread itself over the ceiling and down the length of stony walls grew deeper and heavier over me as I watched Marco fall straight into its depths. The eagerness leaving him shrinking back against the door, his free hand reaching back towards the metal doorknob.

He turns the knob, his back towards the heavy door as he swings it open never letting his sight drop from me. His steps are backwards, retracing himself from coming into the room as he drops his gaze at the last moment the door allows me to see his face. The door shuts and the faint smell of pasta reaches my nose as my sensory is overwhelmed by the thumping in my chest and rumbling in my stomach. The smell of the cheese does little to quarrel the violent lurch that rattles my stomach as the plasticness of it reaches my nervous system.  

It feels artificial; all of it. The way that my tongue sits horribly in my mouth even after the bit of water I’d choked down. The coolness on my back even the room heating up dangerously as the sun kept rising in the distance. The way the books near the door still sat – ripped and torn at the edges and through it – useless for their singular purpose now as they couldn’t even manage to live through my abuse to tell the story of it. It was all as plastic as the cheese Marco had used to season tasteless noodles and I was drowning myself in it as I sat there letting it happen and knowing there wasn’t a way out.

I sit there letting the feeling of it all washing over me as I stare past the blue bowl and irregularly shaped pasta towards the door.

Sitting there for what feels like hours, letting the macaroni cool down in the open air, I’m able to see it all lain in front of me like one of those cheesy horror flicks mom would sit and watch during Halloween in lieu of handing out candy personally.

I hear the yelling before the sound of the front door slamming shut shakes the entire house and I wonder for a second how they’d made such an old, rickety house so sound-proof. I sit there, waiting for some kind of inevitable outcome. Maybe today will be the day – the Spongebob macaroni a bitter façade to hide what was sure to go down in this microwave of a room. The thumps of heavy footsteps rounds around corners my ears can’t seem to map out outside the door and I wait for the clinking of the locks to stop – to make the rush of emotions stop as they try to flood into my ducts of eyes.

I pull my legs in, dragging them with the thin sheets up to my chest, making myself just as small as Marco had felt and the irony of how much we’d mirrored each other in such a short period of time of knowing each other brings that taste of bile back to linger at the back of my throat. I don’t sit long when the large man bursts through the door, letting it slam against the wall next to it and dragging the already torn books further down that rabbit hole to nonexistence. They slam hard between the door and the wall, pages folding and crinkling like no one had once cared so much for the stories that they offered. Like no one in this house gave a shit that some things just want to stay long enough to tell as many people as they can their own stories. To get their testimony of life before decisions are made against their entire existence.

He stands there. Staring at me and glancing at the way the bowl of cardboard pasta has dried over time and back at the way I stay huddled against the wall, hands clamping in the roughness of my jeans. “You wanna die? Is that what you want? To go hungry and die in this room because I can arrange that.”

My throat clenches, my upper body seizing up as I stare back at the man in front of me. I’m afraid to make a move; afraid to even breath too deeply. Instead I let my mouth open involuntarily – the words tumbling out before I can really think them over. An impulse that my mother never taught me well enough to control. My voice is wispy and it rasps slightly at the thickness building still in the back of my lungs. The heaviness of heat settling like a rock in me. “That’s fine. It’d be better than this.”

It was a lie. A bold face lie that starving and turning to bones would be better than just settling with their food but I couldn’t get myself to care. I didn’t want to listen to them telling me what to do; telling me what I should be doing to just fucking survive.

The man must see my bluff and with a short huff he turns around, the slight movement making room for me to see the perk of shiny brown eyes staring wide up at the man. It glances down at me every few seconds but he’s still staring at his dad, shoulders tensed up and I think he’s shivering under the weight of his father’s eyes on him. Is this how Marco acted around his dad?

Well at least I’m not the only terrified of the guy.

That terror though diminished just the slightest as I watched the man in front of me glance back at me with the corners of his eyes, agitation in the way his eyebrows furrowed and his lips turned down at the corners when he realized I wasn’t going to move anytime soon. He looks back at Marco and the stir-crazy look disappears as his shoulders roll back and his chest puffs out and he looks down at the small-looking boy in front of him. Marco looks so small.

“Sit with him. Sit until the little bitch eats everything in that bowl except the spoon. I’ll be back in a couple of hours and if he isn’t done it’s gonna be your ass on the line.”

Marco sputters for a second, his brain obviously trying to catch up with what he’s been told to do and he shuffles inside before the man get his hands anywhere near him. He’s small and he fits right in that gap between the man and the door’s frame – his back grazing and shirt catching on the strike plates. His eyes don’t leave where they’re still watching his dad – making sure that his reaction time is put to speed.

My place on the bed shifts under me as I watch Marco sit on the bed, his ass barely even making a dent but enough to shift the bowl next to him. His father’s eyes travel from one person to the other and his expression doesn’t even change as he grabs onto the doorknob and pulls it behind him as he lets the blockade between the outside world and this cavern locks another victim behind it. Marco’s on the other side now. He’s been set to roam free in the small 15ft by 15ft space and it brings a chuckle to my lips. A deep seated laugh that rumbles straight from deep in my stomach to scratch itself out of my throat still dry in humidity. It’s an airy laugh, the sounds dragging out as Marco snaps his head to me with wide eyes and I probably look insane at the way I let my head fall onto my knees as my shoulders shakes. I probably sound like I’m crying but I’m still not ready to let this puppet of a boy see my tears. He might be on my side now but he wasn’t _on_ my side.

I’m still laughing as I exaggeratedly wipe a finger under my eye, removing the fake tears of a joke no one told and turn to extend my feet out towards him. He flinches so violently it brings him to his feet and he wrings his hands in his palm to quell the anxiety. “Don’t worry. You can sit,” I tell him. He doesn’t believe me. Of course he doesn’t. I don’t trust him so why the hell would he trust me? “I can feed myself so unless you want to stand the entire time it takes your dad to come back wasted and forget that you were put in here with me to piss in that there bucket over there, you might as well sit.”

Its more words than I’ve said in days – actually it must just be the most I’ve said consecutively in weeks. Sitting yourself in front of videos games and raunchy Internet sites for hours during the summer didn’t mean a lot of talking outside the few curse words I threw into my Xbox headsets.

Marco seems to pick up on the cue that I’m not going to eat until his creepy staring is turned down a million notches and he relaxes into a seating position, so he sits. He sits on the floor, the torn books laid out at his feet. He looks down at them with a deep expression across his face as he thinks about the mess I’ve made of the books.

Of his books? Shit. Were these books his at some point?

His hands graze the covers, hovering longer and lingering over the vibrant, vomit-inducing green. Letting his fingers wrap around the fragile spine, Marco picked the book up. His eyes analyzed the way that the pages could barely even hang onto the thin line of glue and how a couple of pages had vanished and were washed together with the rest of the piles of loose leafs hanging around the door.

It’s soft when he says it and I’ve already grabbed the bowl and readied a spoon of cold pasta to enter my mouth when it freezes everything inside of me. The one word does more than any threat the man had heralded over my shoulders and it brings the taste of bile even deeper in my mouth and the sight of cold cheese does little to me except make me all the more nauseous as I watch the pain flash quickly over Marco’s face and disappear just as fast.

“Mama.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd said I'd post in the beginning of April and technically it's not April yet so yay for being early. I'm going to be gone most of the weekend so I figured posting early was okay and after the thumbs up from my beta, I was like this is perfect to do now. 
> 
> Please don't kill me and I know the ending is kind of upsetting or confusing but I will explain it all next chapter. Keep an eye out for that in a couple weeks. Since I've finished my other multichapter fic, I've had more time to write other things. Other things being EreJean week that's been getting a lot of work and has been a blast to write so check that out. 
> 
> Please leave comments and messages as it makes writing a lot more fun when I have that motivation to do it. 
> 
> my tumblr is [mamaarachne](http://mamaarachne.tumblr.com/)


	5. Zinnia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For Marco there are a lot of little things that can be pushed away to the back of his mind. The near constant fumbles in his life as he follows half blind. But the remains of a lost time will always linger no matter how hard he tries to move on and the circumstances aren't doing anyone any favors.
> 
>  **Zinnia**. | _noun_. | thoughts of absent friends

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I changed a couple of the tags and I hope this chapter receives some of the reactions I'm hoping it'll get. Please leave comments and let me know what you think. You can also message me on tumblr if you'd like. It all helps a lot and makes writing easier when I have more of an idea on what to work on.

Dad wasn’t always this…moody? I guess you could call it moody.

He used to wear his thoughts and emotions over his skin like a warm winter jacket – inviting and not at all threatening. A padded layer of protection that spread over the rest of his family to keep them from the outside territory from tearing them up.  But recently it was like night and day, not quite black and white because there was the outline of the other wherever you looked, but not enough to light the darkness and rid it of the unknown parts that I couldn’t get to understanding. He would lash out when something was out of place but then forget where he’d placed his keys just an hour ago. It was spending time making sure that I cleaned after the mess that he created after coming home from work before he blamed the piles of broken dishes on me. Then there were days that was nice. Calm. The calm before the storm, granted, but it was good when he’d come home with groceries and he’d make something hot to eat together. Nights spent together and laughing over whatever old sitcom was playing on the television. It would become an event – helping each other live through the nights when the memories of better times hit us the hardest. The dark always reminding us of scents long gone and almost forgotten that strained to keep its place – its hold – deep in our long-term resources.

But that was a long time ago. Little oasis of memories that seemed to exist in a different timeline – a different universe entirely. All I ever got to see was the night; the painful stab in the gut that left me cowering most nights on my bed hoping he couldn’t hear me breathing too hard. Hoping that he couldn’t hear me mutter little prayers for mom to come back and that the tears would stop choking my in the back of throat; hoping that maybe he’ll someday hear me on a good day and do something – change something – and make it all better again. Make everything better again before it gets too out of hand. Before everything results into the biggest mistakes a good man could ever make. Praying that he’ll figure out the hellish path he’s set on following and dragging me down behind him before it’s too late; knowing that there wasn’t anywhere for me to go other than following –  matching my footsteps behind his dragging feet on a deserted strip of depleting sand. The edges of the land falling apart and slipping away into the void the second I step over the yard. Everything leaving me with nowhere to go but forward and towards the dim light that dad seemed to yearn to get to.

‘Dad’s a good man and he’s lost his way’ is what I constantly repeat to myself as I walked around the small house trying to stagger the dishes in the cabinets. A trick I’d learned to make it seem like they’re filled with the very few dishes we own now after the harder nights. ‘He lost his way. This is all a mistake. Taking Jean was a mistake and everything will be fixed.’

Everything has to be fixed. Nothing worse can ever happen. It can’t.

It’s the stumbling footfalls that echo from down the hall that catches my attention away from the pot I’d been mindlessly stirring. The cheese in the macaroni and cheese thoroughly congealed with the dry noodles, thick with the can of milk I’d found in the back of one of the boxes labeled for my room. The boxes were as much as a mess as everything else and it was all becoming monotonous. The reminders to stand straight when being spoken to and to always listen.

The heavy weight of dad’s body comes crashing into the living room, his hands holding him upright as he slips his shoes onto his toes and stamps them down to get them over the dry, cracking heels of his feet. Mom would always get on his case about it; how the scraping of the parched skin on her bare legs bothered her in the middle of the night when they tangled themselves under the sheets. I wasn’t ever allowed to listen to mother complain farther than that as dad usually sent me out the door because they needed to talk but the memory stuck out and thinking about how I hated watching mom’s smile being shut by the heavy wooden door left a sour taste at the back of my mouth. The taste of backwater and bile rising to fill my nose and ears with the flavors of harsh chlorine and bleach. And I wanted it back. I wanted her smile that always managed the last ditch attempt at lightening an entire room looking down at me right now. Anything – any amount of her sunny persona – rather than the man I can’t even recognize anymore that I claim as my father. He can’t even get himself to look further than his arm’s length. The last few years of blowing smoke in front of his face deteriorating his eyesight and mixing the alcohol to wreck his liver and posture. The austere image of a thriving store owner thrown down into the gutters.  

He mumbles something about going out and when he sees the cheese that clinging onto the wooden spoon in my hand he digs into his pocket and unclasps a set of keys from his car keys and Seattle keychain – a gift from when mom’s parents were alive before I was even born apparently. A small reminder of who we used to be that dad passes by like another story to never tell again in the dead of night when there isn’t much to do other than remember. Violently remember a life when large, bulky keychains from states none of us have ever visited were passed offhandedly to keep me quiet while mom cooked or dad was busy dealing with the storeroom customers.

The keys slide across the counter and I flinch internally at the plausible marks that have been etched onto the laminate from the sharp metal ridges before I look back up. He’s scrounging around his pockets, probably looking for that old Nokia for a cellphone he’d gotten a week ago, the “office line” is what he called it, when he told me that first day of bringing it home. It was new and shiny and the playfully warning look he gave me only peaked my interest further but I was very much over it when I heard the dripping amount of falsity and tacky sweetness that was spoken into the receiver. That little plastic machine was another piece to dad’s dying path to hell and it was another string that kept me attached behind him. Still following without a pair of scissors to cut me off the line.

“Take some of that to the boy.” He doesn’t even look up at me, his entire body busy trying to gain his footing under him with his shoes slipping off the heels, his voice distant as he keeps talking. “Don’t stay in there for too long and make sure to shut the door behind you every time you enter and exit, ya hear me boy?”

I nod my head, my eyes going back to the keys like some kind of deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming big rig. The anxiety that flitters through my chest and into my fidgeting fingertips obvious to anyone that was actually paying attention to the small boy standing in the middle of the small kitchen. The pulse racing in my neck and wrists and chest and I can feel myself panicking internally and turning a horrible shade of green that could rival any dying blade of grass I’d passed on my way into the house yesterday morning. He didn’t know that I’d gone into the room last night and hopefully I don’t look guilty enough to give off that air. The theories of how he had managed to grab the keys before I’d come to stand in the kitchen so early in the day flew through my head like the cars on the racetrack that would play during the summer and it makes the urge to run away even stronger. I wasn’t a racecar but the consequences of lying was comparatively still as large as a big rig next to a deer and I wondered for a second _how fast can a baby deer run?_

He accepted the agreement – the offhanded nod of my head and stuttered reply to do what he asked – and with more heavy bangs of the door he leaves me standing in the kitchen staring stupidly at a set of keys with a spoon in hand as the noodles start sticking to the sides of the pan. Left wondering if the house could even stand any more doors slamming uselessly into its frames.

\----

Bringing and leaving the pasta had been the easy part. No talking involved other than the instructions dad had given me repeated mechanically at the boy in front of me. My mouth flapping away as I kept the rest of me from imploding from the anxiety that kept trying to creep into the back of my throat. The presence of it threatening to make my voice hitch under the strain of choking down invisible tears that felt misplaced under how lithe Jean looked sitting on the bed.

Jean looked deathly pale. The usual flush of his cheeks from when he was more upset had gone limp and he looked as white as the sheets that littered the ends of his bed. The whites of his eyes and the teeth that bared itself over the lips he was biting melded into the rest of his face. The look on his face ineffable as his eyes seared into my face. His habit of looking rather than speaking was unnerving.

I set the bowl onto the end of the bed far away from where Jean was balanced off the edge of the bed with his feet barely hitting the floor. My heart racing as I got closer to him as he scuffed his sock-clad toe across the cool floor. The need to distance myself and get out of the room pulsed my blood through my head even faster as I tried to avoid looking at Jean. I don’t know why I was so afraid of him; the fear was vapid. The way that his eyes beaded together and he furrowed his eyebrows made him look silly in the grand scheme of things unholy. He was just a kid like me with probably less strength as his smaller, thinner body seemed more fragile and porcelain. And also seeing as how the smell of dehydration was filling out from the corner of the room it was easy to see that he was starting to lack the proper nutrients to keep him pepped up. The boxed macaroni and cheese wouldn’t do much to help other than offer the empty carbs and temporary energy to get through how many more days.

I probably should’ve grabbed the bucket before I locked the doors back up behind me and paced back into the living room with my own bowl in hand. Why I even took my own food with me to give Jean his was beyond my grasp as everything seemed to float around my head like I was caught in the middle of a bowl of Jell-O. Time and space meshing together around me as I slunk into the plush of the leather couch in the living room after setting the bowl of macaroni onto the coffee table. The small television set not doing anything to my attention as I let it sit in the darkness with me. The static of the television would be a distraction for only a second before it fades out into the background and I end up in trouble for running up the electricity.  

I manage to stuff down some of my food and clean up and take a shower before dad was due to come back home. It wasn’t always a scheduled “welcome home” but it was safe to assume that once the sun started to set into the horizon, dad would be home. Whether it was to maintain the sentiment it was hard to tell when all you could see was the mess and smell the smoke and fire on his clothes.

The cold shower had startled me back into reality at first; the chill that ran down my back from the nape of my neck to splatter onto the mold-ridden, fiberglass tub off my rear shocked me from how cold it was. The heat was on, the water heater roaring away in the closet off the hall, but it took a while for the water to turn a temperature comfortable to douse myself in. The sound of the empty tub being sprayed with the cold water as I waited off to the side of the strong water pressure was calming to look into. The way the water missed the rusty and moldy edges of the grout in favor of staying centered onto the ridged floor where my feet ran circles into the bumps that rose from the smooth surface was nice.

It took a while, but the pressure finally turned to a more favorable temperature and I jumped right in and let the flow run down my hair and onto my closed eyes. The prickle of heat and the cool air on my skin did wonders to my sore body as I let my head droop onto my chest as the water poured over my head. I opened my eyes, looking down at my small feet and how the water rippled a little when I shifted from where the small clog in the drain kept the backwater from going straight down. This house was old and worn down and the creak in my shifting made it vocal and echo around the small bathroom as I grabbed the bar of soap and ran it over my head and body as quickly as I could.

The water rinsed away the dirt and pressure down the drain and I felt clean as stood and let the water keep washing through my hair. My bangs were sticking to my forehead, my eyes basically covered by the dark mess and I let them close again as I kept pace with my breathing. The pattering of the water on to the tub rhythmic as I let everything wash away.

The calm before the storm.

Dad came home around 6 PM; the sun on the verge of falling behind the mountainside fully and dousing the city underneath in darkness. The rattle of the old engine in his truck shaky and sounding like it’s on its last leg as he cuts it off with a swift pull of his keys. The door slams shut and there’s the sound of some scuffling and muttering outside where it sounds like he was intercepted by a friendly neighbor.

His voice is civil as he speaks, the few hiccups reverberates straight to me – letting me know more than that whichever civilian that had caught dad in the aftermaths of his day out will ever understand. I stand next to the kitchen counter, ready for anything that could happen as I hear him trundle the rest of the way up the stairs. He’s gentler on the door as he shuts it with a wave over his shoulder and I barely catch a glimpse of the old lady that’s walking away before it closes fully. The wide brim of a large, straw hat lain carefully over short, slightly-graying hair as she walks away in her lounge attire elicits a sharp pain in my chest. The nostalgic stab in the chest as the bounce in her steps remind me so forcefully of someone that’s been gone for so long.

Mom would’ve been like her – fitting one hat after the other on her head to “create the outfit” as much as “making the outfit” she wanted to show off that day. Nothing she deemed worthy to show off on a runway but just for herself and the few customers that came into the shops when she was manning the counter and dad worked in the back while I slipped between aisles trying to find the candy I loved that she placed on the top shelf. She would’ve still been young now but she could’ve been that. She could’ve had that. I could’ve seen her outside of hospital gowns and tubes of foreign science experiments. Dad would’ve maybe been the same man I remembered so long ago and wanted to see again.  

He seems to realize that too as he stares longer at the door shutting us inside more than keeping the outside out before turning back to me with eyes sharper than I’ve seen in days. He’s sobered up noticeably in just a few minutes.

“Did he eat?”

I stutter for a second but clear my throat before I get in trouble. “I-I’m not sure. I didn’t get to check.”

It’s like I let lose one of those small bottle rockets the kids on our old street used to play with during the summer nights. The little contraptions that they built with empty 2-litre soda bottles and duct tape and used the pressure to let it pop into the sky above them. A pointless game of building and destroying that captivated even the old men that sat on the stoops and drank the day away. A tradition passed down to spend hours in the monotonous speed that you lied to yourself about because of course you’re having fun doing the same thing over and over and watching the tops pop off over and over as well. It was a lie. It wasn’t meant to be a game so scheduled and written in stone.

It was a storm.

A storm that blows through the living room and down the hall and slams into the door at the end. He yells back for me to hand him the keys and I let out a squeak as I run back to the counter where I’d set them and rush back down the hall to hand them to him cautiously. He slaps them out of my grasp, almost dropping them in the process, and continues his wild spurring movements as he violently gets the locks open.

I don’t understand why he’s like this. Why he seems to be on edge all of a sudden over something I could check. Was it from seeing that lady outside that held the bag of her personal belongings on her wrists like the “Queen of England” just as mom compared it? Was it because I was so lost in my own head, dragging through the thick sludge of my thoughts, to remember to check up on the boy living in their closet? Was he lashing out on something else for my mistakes?

Whatever it was, it was apparently worth the whirlwind of threats and remarks that were sent through the tension-infused air around the musty room. The smell of piss had enhanced tenfold and I scrunched my nose a bit without making it to obvious how uncomfortable it was making me. The stench of it mixed with Jean’s lack of a warm shower just intermingled with that small ounce of guilt that liked to build inside of me every time I caught the light brown tone over his darker undercut. His hair was being stupid and unruly after not being washed for two days but it and the rest of his features gave off the tone that Jean belonged to the high and mighty. And the look in his eyes and snarl of his mouth showed that he was not to be trifled with. The scowl on his lip as vicious as dad seems to be radiating and it’s like he’s leeching off the anger dad’s holding between his fingers as he grips hard on the sheets under him. He’s still very much weak, the bowl of macaroni having gone uneaten and cold, and it shows as Jean shakes visibly in anger and weaknesses.

There’s a blur of words between dad and Jean, the look of misplaced threats on dad’s face while Jean dared him to touch him with just the flick of his eyebrows. It’s when I hear my name, the syllables dragging under a slur and it’s responded with brevity as I pop my head around the doorway that I was hidden behind. Jean seems to finally notice me, his eyes scrunching and nose wrinkling in distaste at just the sight of me and I almost take a step back before I’m being pulled into the room.

He tells me to stay in there, the repulsive stench slinging me back towards the living room before I’m pushed back even further towards the bed and told it’s my job to listen. He doesn’t need to stay it, the fire in his eyes as he glances between two 11 year old boys is enough to tell me that I have to listen or else. Or else there would be repercussions. This wasn’t something that could be slid past without knowing that there were certain circumstances to letting that door close and I had to be the one holding up my own and making sure things were done properly. I had to be the sturdy tree that gave shade and supplied food and support.

It was my job since the day mom had said so; to listen. To follow behind and let that string jostle me around without complaints because it was expected of me as the child to pay heed to the elder’s commands. To listen to the one that asked too much but stay quiet and accept it because it was all I was capable of doing with my small frame.

I had to be the very thing left scattered across the hardwood floors as I stood in front of a closed door, waiting for something to knock me back to a different reality. Mom’s book ripped to pieces and strewn around like confetti for a party meant for nobody. The pages leaving scratch marks deep enough to have drawn blood every time it slips away onto the floor to join the others.

I’m crying – I know that much. And I can’t get myself to stop as every little thing inside of me that had built up that dam above my head rushes out in a torrential downpour out of me. Jean is watching and I can feel the way his eyes trail over me and my snotty face but it doesn’t matter. I don’t care anymore and I try to keep my voice as low as possible while the tears silently slip down my face and meet the same end as the pages.

 _The Giving Tree_ had been a nighttime event back when mom was well enough to hold the book and herself on her own. The cancer had gotten to her bones and made her weak by the time I was starting grade school, but she still made the effort to read me the same bedtime story every night. The story of the tree that gave all that she could for a boy that didn’t appreciate it until the tree was gone. A story that rang in my ears every time I walked home to an empty house and made myself dinner that left burns on my wrists because I wasn’t tall enough to reach the lip of the pot. Burns that never matched the old scars left my alcohol nights but still stung just as hard.

I can hear Jean eating now, the small scrapes of the metal spoon on the plastic bowl scratching into the drying cheese and mushy noodles is nowhere near reminiscent to the clanging of a wooden spoon on the floor and the rush of water from the sink hitting my hot skin swallowed by mouthed curse words. I don’t look up from where my hands are clutching hard onto the book – the familiar green doing a lot to calm me from falling into the flow of water already rushing over my head, trying to take me with it out to sea. It’s used to keep me from getting anxious during the nights when it was too cold to leave the bed and find more blankets to cover myself with and now it was just scraps of paper that was kicked around by the door’s swing and pattering feet on the warming floor.

The sound of Jean placing his bowl down back onto the mattress, the spoon ringing loudly as it bounces off the rim gets me to look back up at Jean where he’s staring at me. His eyes are unwavering as his eyes flit across my face like it always seems to whenever we find each other alone in front of each other. It’s disconcerting and I have no idea what he’s looking for on my face but the way that he lingers across my cheeks reddens them further. The moments of silence between us where we just look at each other gives me a chance to look at him even better. Those moments when Jean had been knocked out in the backseat of the car was little if nothing compared to what Jean looks like with his eyes open and face lively with bottled emotions. His lips look dry, the ends cracking and spit accumulating in the corners of his mouths that turn them white and pale.

My mouth turns down in a frown and I look over at the water bottle that had been sitting there since the night before and I notice that the seal has been cracked but the two centimeters between the bottle’s meniscus from the top of the bottle worries me and I turn back to Jean.

He’d followed my eyes to where I was looking and we both turn back at the same time and he scowls and looks over at the door as he mutters something and I exhale loudly before I grab the bottle and thrust it into his face – my movements so robotic and fast it surprised me when I find myself closer to Jean. When I’d moved my feet away from the piles of papers on the floor and stopped clutching the book to my chest in favor of handing the bottle over is beyond my knowledge and Jean seems just as surprised. He falters for a second before taking the bottle with a heavy expression on his face and snapping the cap off and taking a small sip.

A small sip that turns into large gulps that leaves the bottle at half full and a gentle reminder to myself to make sure to refill the thing as soon as dad lets me out. If dad even lets me out tonight which I doubt considering he’d left the house in such a hurry to get somewhere without telling me. I’m used to it but it’s still a punch in the stomach when I realize that I’d be spending the most of part of the night standing precariously over Jean clutching onto a broken book.

It’s Jean’s halting movements of him sliding back on the bed and shifting himself back to the wall to allow room for a second person without dangling their feet that shows a ray of sunlight digging through the roar of water still sitting well over my head. The sounds of flowing water and silence in my ears making way to small mumbles and muffled sounds that has become this bit of hope that reaches my ears with a stronger power in the form of the small amount of mattress that Jean’s left open for me to sit down on.

I move myself closer to where Jean had just been perched, the edge of the bed still warm from his meager body heat and I get myself to climb up next to that dented space and slide back enough to get my feet off the ground but still letting them dangle over the edge of the bed – the anxiety inside of me rippling out of my legs and jerking them around to hit at the mattress every few seconds as we sit quietly. He doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything. It’s really quiet as we listen to the way the room seems to breathe in the nervousness and exhales anxiety which we take in like a different brand of oxygen that chokes itself down our throats. Jean keeps to himself – huddling his chest into his chest as he looks straight at the side of my face – and I’m left with staring at the book in my hands and feeling the rage burn in my guts that must be simmered down before I cause a fire inside myself.

“Why did you do it?” I don’t know what makes me say it. I never seem to know why I’m doing the things I’m doing. It’s all following another person’s line of sight and adjusting meant finding yourself lost and scrabbling at the edges for some kind of purchase that can help you understand. And I want to understand. I want to understand so, so much it hurt. Whether it’s the slow burn in my stomach that’s inching its way into my trembling fingers or the tiredness in my every bone it doesn’t matter much anymore because it’s out before I can pull it back into my mouth. I try not to flounder around where I’m seated, Jean’s eyes haven’t left their place on my face and the thought of him seeing me red from a single question would be horrible for me. The reason for which eludes me but the reaction is sure fire.

I turn to look at the other boy, to find a way to gage his expression and the way his light brown eyes squint back at me, his mouth turned down exaggeratedly has me reeling back and staring back at my hands. I don’t take back my question, though. I still want to know why a book had to be a result of injustice. An object caught in the path of destruction that could’ve been spared. Was Jean never taught the importance of keeping your books sacred? Of worshipping books for the knowledge that it gave us if you looked properly?

The fire that was set in me fell flat and extinguished itself as Jean’s hoarse voice rose higher than its muttered volume. “Why did your dad put me in this room?”

It’s a small question, his voice barely over that rough whisper but loud enough to leave it ringing in my ears as I feel the pressure building back up in my eyes. Jean is pale and weak and the way that he shivers in his clothes in the corner of a cement-blocked room is as much my fault as it is my dad’s. The fight that I could’ve fought on behalf of Jean had flown out the car window the second I was told to shut the hell up and was given expletives to think over while Jean was stuffed next to me as a façade of happy family on a trip to grandma’s house. It was all a lie and I had let it go on until this point in our lives. I’d let Jean into this house. I’d opened the door and the rush of water over me felt deeper and colder as it dug further into my bones. Searing my skin on its way to run through my veins like a poison with no cure.

The fire in Jean seems to wane as the bed creaks again and Jean speaks up, more sure of how steady his voice will be. He fails, though, as it squeaks terribly on the first few words that strain itself out. “Shit. Wait it’s not your fault. Not really. I’m just-”

“No it is,” I interrupt. The strength of my words surprises Jean as I watch his eyebrows react and eyes widen as he stares at me. I grow smaller under his gaze but maintain that calmness in how I speak up. Showing weakness only allows others to dig deeper into your resolve. “I didn’t do anything and I’m sorry. It’s just – you didn’t have to ruin my books.”

If it could be anymore possible, Jean’s face seems all the more shocked. He might’ve expected a different response and I was entitled to make this conversation deeper than where I took it but the possibility in bringing up those things meant digging myself even deeper and letting the water flow even more above my head – the inches leading into meters of water on my shoulders and that wasn’t something I wanted to risk. Instead I focused on how Jean’s face reddens and he turns it down at his own hands in a reflection of the shame I felt for accusations aimed at my head.

He mutters an apology. A whole-hearted apology. A small yet vocal “I’m sorry”.

It feels worse than the shot to my chest when he’d asked why he was put into the room. He’s apologizing for making me feel bad when he was the one ripped away from his family and forced to piss into a vile bucket. Why would he apologize to me for something so stupid? _Why_ was all of this so damn stupid and why am I not allowed to just evaporate into thin air and leave this godforsaken room?

I cradle my head in my hands on my lap, my body hunched over myself and the book in my lap to keep me from falling too far forward. My breathing is rough and out of sync and I try to bring it back to match the evenness of a normal heartbeat – the lyrics to ‘Stayin’ Alive’ playing through my head just like mom had once told me do.

 I try to keep quiet as I calm myself down and Jean seems to retract from his slump. The sound of the bed creaking again shoots my head back up and the motion makes me dizzy for a second as I try to focus bleary eyes on Jean’s blond head. He’s sliding across the bed on his butt to rest his feet down next to mine on the floor, the pat of bare feet on cement unfamiliar to what I was used to on hardwood and carpeting.

His face is red and I stare at him in wonder – hoping quietly that this wasn’t about to turn into a half-baked attempt at escape. “I really have to pee.”

The redness on Jean darkens and the feeling is mutual as I feel my ears and the back of my neck heat up. I turn my head away as Jean stands on wobbly legs, his hands finding a perch on the bookshelf and bed to keep him from falling right over. I stay staring at the wall pretending like I didn’t hear Jean say something about needed to shit as well but didn’t want me to suffer through that adventure and I sigh with gratitude.

So happy that the boy that’s about to pee in a bucket for the second time in over 24 hours is holding in his feces in embarrassment.

Jean is weak. He plays it like he’s not and whenever he face dad he tries to pull up that façade, that barrier over his face, that says he’s not weak but the way that he loudly limps himself over to the corner of the room says otherwise. Jean is weak and he needs someone to help him but I doubt that he’d ever accept my help.

The blush that glows deeper over my upper body leaves me fully red in the face at the idea of helping Jean piss. The thought of helping Jean with holding it is just squirm-worthy.

Almost as horrible as hearing Jean peeing. The sound of the piss hitting hollowly into the bucket feels like its echoing in my head and how it sounds so empty for some reason brings my eyes dragging down to the book still sitting on my lap. My eyes clamp shut over the rush of new tears and there is no place for them here. Not now. Not when I can hear Jean turning back after zipping himself up and padding his way back to the bed. But the book is so heavy in my hands, its weight like an anchor inside of me that just likes to drag me back down further whenever I remember it’s there. A constant, steady reminder that I’m it’s everything and everything must have a fall. I let it fall out of my hands and onto the bed beside me but it’s still there.

It’s a reminder of the late nights when mom would read to me and how the smell of warmth and apple cinnamon would contrast so deeply with alcohol-soaked carpets and the tub of bleach kept in the laundry room for dad’s clothing on long weekends.

It was a reminder of hearing mom tell me how loving selflessly was what God wanted and how I’d promised to be that good boy mom spoke so highly of. To be that person that listened to what dad said and acted with a clear head and an open heart. To be the boy that did what he was told and waited to be rewarded with happiness. A happiness that would someday rain down upon him in a shower of that same warmth that smelled so much like cinnamon.

But that shower turned into a storm, a hurricane I was thrown into the center of. The mess and chaos swirling around my head and water building itself over my head and although I can breathe a bit better compared to the sensations of drowning in my own pool of spite, the pressure builds stronger when you’re stuck in the eye. The homing point for when things collapse absolutely around you. Once the strongest points of the storm ends, once it’s over, there’s only one way that it can all end. Over and around him. An internal earthquake that can’t be stopped. Trying to walk away would mean walking straight into the heat of the storm and waiting just meant a prolonged shatter. The thought of just walking away was enough to show that slip of light in the storm, the sun cresting itself in the cracks of dark clouds but it isn’t enough to stop the wetness from hitting hard against my face.

The tears that flow silently as my mind tries to stop myself from overthinking, from revolting against itself.

Jean is close. I can feel his heat radiating in front and around me but the smell of cinnamon isn’t there and I take a second to sort out the salty water running down my face and snot dribbling out of my nose before turning back towards him.

He’s standing so close to me and I startle for a second at how hard his brown eyes narrow down at me. But it isn’t harsh. The tawny color of his irises take the effect of changing colors between the light brown and a color I couldn’t exactly place but what I am sure of is how hard they flicker even closer over my face. They swiftly move across every inch of my face and I watch as he gets closer, no idea for personal space, as he tries to probably count the number of freckles that littered my face. Mom would always say that God had left them there because he ran out of space to put his stars and he’d made a game of placing constellations onto the faces of his most loved children. I’d accepted the fairy tale wholeheartedly until the day that numerous stars faded out and died, taking my mother along with them.

My face flushes again as Jean is relentless on his mission and I turn my face back down at where I’d placed my book. I’m wide-eyed as I see that it’s instead in Jean’s hands, the signs of crumpled pages and wrinkled ink thrown haphazardly back into the broken binding of the green covers. _The Giving Tree_ given a revival of sorts as the pages lay heavily stuffed back into order. 

Jean throws it back into my hands on my lap, that heaviness that had been weighing me further down to the depths of pool, keeping me grounded so steadily in the middle of the hurricane in fear of the unknown outside the little border of faux calm I was allowed, slightly lighter now as its missing pieces were brought back together.

Its cover is still bent out of shape, the corners folded over and over again from being abused. And the pages are all wrinkled and look lifeless if it weren’t for the words and images that were painted onto its exterior to say otherwise. It’s his book. His mother’s book that could withstand a little abuse and wear-and-tear. Wiping the tears away again, I sit back onto the bed, my knees coming up to my chest where I lay my book. The hard binding clutched between my heaving chest and my thighs as I try to keep myself from breaking down again. I let my eyes close again and when I open them again and look up at Jean he nods his head a climbs back up onto the bed and shuffles over to his corner.

We haven’t said much to each other in the last few hours but the little gesture from Jean left me with enough gratitude to thank him for years on end. Although it was his fault that he’d destroyed something so important to me without a second thought, he’d taken it upon himself to _try_ to right his wrongs and that went a long way. It felt like receiving all of the warm hugs I’d been missing for the past few years all coming and rushing through my chest and into my fingertips all at once. It warmed me and I could feel myself warming again as I watched Jean sit back against the wall, letting his head rest at the corner where the two stone-cold walls met. His eyes are still watching me and I let him watch. Let him gauge whether he can trust me enough to let himself close his tired-looking eyes. The bags under his eyelids growing heavier under only he knows what thoughts cloud his head.

I turn away as he keeps looking and clutch harder at the book in my hands like it’s a lost puppy found after weeks of searching and the sigh that resounds around the room from Jean relaxes me where I’m sat. The sky outside is dark. The little bit of stars that I can see from where I’m sat across the room lights the room very little and it’s too dark to open the book and stare at the words etched onto its pages so I clutch even harder at it. Making sure that it was still there and wouldn’t be snatched away from me.

Turning back to Jean, his eyes closed and breathes heavy with sleep and small muttering and snores, I hear the click of the front door unlocking. I let my eyes wander over the rise and fall of Jean’s chest, the way that his lithe fingers clutch at his jeans and the thin fabric of the sheets, and how his toes curl under the little cover his socks give while he dreams. My eyes wander over Jean while my ears listen to the stumbling outside the door. There’s the small sound of something falling and cracking but it’s hard to place the sound and it seems foreign compared to the usual mess and I shake the worry out of my head and turn back to Jean.

Everything inside me is hoping, reaching for the stars, that dad will remember where he’d left his only son; but the sounds of how heavy his footfalls are under the dark light in the hallway and how he clatters his keys onto the counter without a second thought brings those hopes falling down around me. A small washing machine sized clatter in my own little hurricane of horror.

The promise of spending the night watching Jean and hoping to God that dad will be sober enough to remember I’m in here is heavy over me even as I hear the heavy stumbling reach closer to their door. There’s hope for another second but the turn of heaviness down towards the right of the door and the slam of another wooden door on its rusty hinges calms it back down inside of me. The loud bang of the door rumbling the entire house that stirs Jean just the slightest echoes heavily until it wanes back into the silence and sounds of just Jean snoring peacefully.

That same peacefulness that had passed over his face a day ago in the truck was written across Jean’s face. The lack of worry lines and frowning faces refreshing in a horrible sort of way as I watch him breath in from his mouth and exhale out his nasally nose. He seems like the type to be a heavy sleeper and the circumstances haven’t seemed to change that in one bit. It’s probably the heaviness of the situation that’s lodged itself inside of him that keeps him unconscious on a foreign, hard bed next to me, a strange kid with a buttload of freckles and no idea where I’m headed.

Still holding the book tightly to my chest, I let myself slink back onto the mattress. My knees still curled into myself and to my chest as I close my eyes and let the sounds of Jean snoring quietly be that steady pace of tempo that helps me breathe better as sleep find me as well.

\----

It’s the gradual shifting of the bed that gets me on the edges of consciousness. The small mattress creaking and groaning of a shared weight and the rippling motion it causes down to where I’m splayed across the sheets. The bed isn’t very comfortable – barely five inches thick with a majority of it being full of air and metal springs but it’s comfortable with the warmth that’s being shared over the small space.

The body at the end of the bed shifts again and I match the motion as I try to get my eyes to open to the sunlight that’s shining through the small window across the room. It’s a feat, a battle of warding off the sleepiness for being alive and moving, but I manage to crack one eyes open to look around me and at the mattress’s rumpled sheets before it lands on the blurry figure of a small boy still huddled in the corner. He’d shifted around in his sleep or awake and was closer than Jean had been the previous night when he’d chosen to squish himself into the room’s corner. His legs folded under him and his hands gripping hard onto the dirty jeans he’s wearing as he stares at me intently, the anxiousness of waiting for me to wake up clear on his face. The way his lips are parted open as he breathes in deeply and waits for me to do something really does do something to me.

I feel my stomach flutter, a panicky yet pleasant feeling and I probably look like a flustered, sleepy mess but it feels too early to really care about that when Jean is staring intently at me. the intensity of his eyes just leaves me anxious and it’s an flutter that I can’t place and it makes me nervous and more awake as I let my head dig further into the mattress.

I let my head relax and shove it back down further and let my breathing relax as Jean keeps up his shifting. I feel the traces of his fingers over my shoulder for a second before it disappears just as fast as it had shown up and I try to remain calm and not stiffen too noticeably at the potential contact Jean had tried to create. He wanted me to wake up and I could totally do that if he could just give me another five minutes or so to relax the tension in my spine and shoulders before sitting up and playing the same staring game for however long it takes dad to wake up and realize I’m not in the kitchen making something to eat.

The sound of thumping comes from around the corner and it’s like my internal alarm has gone off as I slowly start to lift my head off the mattress. Dad’s awake. The rude awakening like coffee laced with cocaine that brings you back to Starbucks every day. A cultured way of living day to day wondering how the morning would treat me and if I’ll live to see the next day. Conscious that any day a pipe could burst or the ocean could over flood and instead of the threat of drowning hung over my head, I’d be washed out to see where no one could ever find me.

The keys jingle outside the door simultaneously with my feet hitting the ground as I slide back towards the edge of the bed. Jean hasn’t moved a muscle since the steps had sounded and I look over through my eyelashes and see this terror in his eyes as he stares intently at the door. He’s scared. He doesn’t know that there was once a chance for good morning and good nights. His fear is validated when the door throws open and its edges rifle through the pool of pages still on the floor.

He looks like a mess; more so than usual and it perks my ears up as his presence weighs down the room and creates the rippling tension that leaves my stomachs in knots and wanting to vomit. Jean’s fingers are picking at his nails and clicking loudly in the silence while my fingernails dig little crescent into my palms that threaten to bring up blood. Dad is a mess and we’re a duo of children that are caught beneath him and forced to inhale his being.

He seems so broken and different and it’s a morning to raw emotion escaping out into the stale air of the room. The cigarettes and alcohol leaving marks on his body that went deeper than the ones that I could count on my own. His own personal freckles he’d created on his own as a rouse to be like this family’s Giving Tree.

Dad looks down at me and I can see his face fall for a second. He looks sad and crushed and it hits hard in an already fluttery and twisted stomach as tears try to make their way back into the pool I was creating around me. It hasn’t even been ten minutes since I woke up to Jean looking earnestly at me and I was already starting to cry like a baby.

He grabs the bowl that’s still placed at the end of the bowl and hums quietly to himself and with a swift change he’s back to donning his rigid shell of a persona. His face hardens and his eyebrows pull together as he shoves the bowl into my chest, the push off it winding me. “Go clean this.”

A small command over a loving request wasn’t a good sign but arguing and trying to stay there to protect Jean wasn’t going to do anything over a 200 pound man and I hurried out of the room, pulling the door with me. It creaks from overuse of its hinges and the heaviness of it and the numerous locks bolted onto it is seemingly too much for my still half-asleep body as a small gap is left in the doorway. But I leave it in favor of getting away as far as I can; as soon as I can. I wanted to be there for Jean but the other half of me would always want to get away no matter what responsibilities I had to anyone. Becoming the Giving Tree shouldn’t have been left up to me and trying to mold into it was suffocating and tiring but I nonetheless would rather scrub dishes for weeks than confront the greater of the evils.

Stepping down the hallway with the bowl in shaking hands and coming out to the living room I found the source of the small tinkling noises that I’d heard when dad had bumbled his way home. The remnants of a small porcelain doll splayed across the kitchen counter that looked over the living room sat broken. I’d left it out that first night we’d first gotten here, a reminder, and now it sat torn to pieces worse than the damage done to the book. The only part intact enough to even show a glimpse of it was the small head of the porcelain cherub, a cute white little thing that mom had gotten for Christmas when I was just five years old.

The memory of that day was faded and long ago but as I clench onto the small remaining pieces I can remember how ecstatic mom had been when she’d unwrapped the gift. The small little black box that had been covered messily by his dad with the only bit of help a five year old could offer and red wrapping paper was meant to be a surprise but of course my excited, loud mouth had spoiled half the secret the night Santa was due to come and bring her “the special angels” to help her feel better.

My grip tightens hard on the little sharp-edged piece and I don’t realize I’ve cut myself until I relinquish the head and find it dusted with the light shades of red over the face and head. The clean white of my palm and the doll’s small head layered by my blood from the cut in the center of my palm.

My eyes glaze over the cut, the small droplets of blood pooling in the ridges and fortune lines of my hand that would stain onto the hardwood floors underneath me if I so wanted to tilt my hand one way or the other. The chance to make and leave my mark based on one small decision of where I put my hand next. But the string tied around my wrists pull tight and drag me away from that path as my fist closes again and the faint sounds of thumping register in my ears. The thuds are loud and followed with shouts and more thuds and I push it off as dad making Jean clean.

I shut it out; even as the replies that I hear coming back grow louder and louder and I really should’ve made sure to have closed the door all the way.

I dig my hand into my pocket, depositing the little doll head there until I have the time to take it back to my room where it belongs – where it can live in peace. Making sure that I don’t leave blood stains on my pants and avoid that messy job of bleaching and cleaning, I go back to grabbing the bowl off the counter and cleaning up. Shutting off the small whimpers that echo from the small leeway of the door left unlocked after each resounding thud of something hard.


	6. Oleander

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Living a life hiding behind static and color-integrated screens can alter your perceptions on how you take in the world. It can't, however, mask the pain that lashes across your skin.
> 
>  **Oleander**. | _noun_. | the oleander is poisonous, people are pretty cautious with it. However, this flower is beautiful and for that reason you will see it in a lot of arrangements. People should heed caution if they are going to use it in bouquets because those may spread the toxins easier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is where the /child abuse/ tag comes into play, so fair warning. 
> 
> If things of that nature makes you uncomfortable, I am sorry but that's the fic and I have moderating fluff fics on my AO3 to make up for it.

There wasn't the sun hitting my face like a magnifying glass held up at the right angle to sear a hole into my retinas as I tried to bury my face deeper into the soft down of my queen sized mattress. It wasn’t anything remotely similar to the sensation of an aired out bedroom large enough to hold a desk and floor space alongside my bed to have a sleepover for five nonexistent best friends. It wasn’t the smell of bacon and fresh morning shakes that caught me up with consciousness. Neither was there the reminder from the wash that someone needed to take care of the ironing before wrinkles starting accumulating in my tee shirts.

The lingering smell of pee and the hardness of the thin springs under me wasn’t even what caught my attention as my eyes slowly opened and dropped away the crust accumulated in its corners. The ache in my back from the odd angle I’d left myself in the night before registered dully as I tried to lift my head away from the heaviness on my shoulders and chest. It was suffocating in the room and it slowly began its journey back to me as the sleep fell away onto my lap slowly. Everything moving in slow motion as my mouth gave another day’s duty to being as parched as a camel in the Sahara or Rick Grimes in a forest with no amenities. Essentially very dry and in need of some kind of human interaction that wasn’t limited to the two hosts he’d been forced into meeting personally. Everything so forced on my body and mind that just getting myself to slide my back against the wall behind me took a while and minutes of blinking into the dull sunlight illuminating the concrete room.

The lump of a warm body on the other side of the small space, curled into themselves and shivering in the early morning cool that would barely last for another hour as sunlight started to make headway over the horizon coming from the window was what brought me to sit up on my ass faster than a tornado warning. My head hitting hard against the sturdy cement and creating a throbbing ache where I would most definitely get a lump as I tried to grasp onto nonexistent leverages under me. The bed squishing under my hands as they tried to find purchase to center me back on my lungs’ personal rotation – the swirling in my breathing and head mixing with the disgusting taste of my mouth.

He’s on the other side of the bed but it feels way too close for comfort the way Marco just lays there out in the open at my feet. So vulnerable to the end of my heel if I so wanted to be the hostage to hold a hostage. The dynamics of video games that never made sense to me but maintained my attention span for hours of the day. The plot sequence running in the back of my mind like a story that nobody could ever forget and it’s a shot in the heart as I watch the way Marco’s fists clench around the sheets and relax as his entire upper body lays flat, protecting the green-covered book under it.

I’d managed to fuck up and destroy Marco’s “video game” and the guilt had left me scrounging around for something to do to make amends but the way the papers still crinkled under him as he shifted slightly was the assurance that I hadn’t don’t anything of use. Not really. I’d created a lie in Marco’s broken world as much as his offer of food and water had been in mine but his was more sincere – done under the intention to help while I’d done it to bring back some semblance of a nonexistent honor.

Either way you pictured it, we lied to each other. A false hope that we drowned in silence and forgot to send vocal reassurances in lieu of just staring like complete idiots. Neither of us knew what to do, how to respond, to each other’s presence. I was as much unwanted a visitor as I felt to be an unwanted guest. He didn’t want me here and I didn’t want to be. Simple as that.

But the way he tenses and relaxes against the sheets and the fluttering oh his eyelashes hitting his cheekbones draws me in and it’s so hard not to stare. It’s either spending what little moments I have of quiet before the oncoming storm to count how many constellations I can count across Marco’s face or spending it staring into oblivion and tracing patterns into the ceiling instead.

A moving canvas was always the more efferent of options. Living outside the box of traditional media because it might not be appreciated societally or socially but it was better than staring at immobile objects and waiting for something interesting to pop out of the dark.

Mom would always say that reading a book or getting into art would do me a world of good but I couldn’t understand the type of good that could come from a blank sheet of scribbles and nothing when there were things that already had a set storyline and were able to move about in different ways, with different skills, that could capture my attention for years. I’d rather spend the day playing video games than splash paint across a piece of paper. Listening to the different sounds a person could make was better than having to use my “imagination” for a crap drawing I didn’t give two shits about.

Mom was a stickler for those sort of things. “Imagination is the stepping stone to big things, Jeanbo.” Stepping stones that somehow got me outside and into a cave that smells horrible with no aeration system at all.

Marco’s mumbling to himself in his sleep and it’s incoherent, his lips mostly moving against each other without really opening his mouth, but I’m able to catch the few words that resound louder than the others. Marco’s fists clenching harder into the wrinkled sheets as his voice whines in the quiet morning.

“Mom. Mama.”

The sun has barely made it over the roof of the neighbor’s house twenty yards away from the window, a tiny beacon of light that doesn’t quite light the room but does enough to catch how Marco’s face wrinkles in pain and annoyance and most of all, sadness, as he squirms over the corners of the book.

My heart feels like it’s on a journey to slowly reach entropy, turning into mush by the end of this ordeal as my eyes stay glued onto the way the pages crinkle even more as Marco seems to squirm even more from a nightmare or something and is on the brink of waking himself up with how he keeps digging his ribcage into the jagged edge of _The Giving Tree_.

Marco had been wrecked when he saw the remains of that one book. The ripped pages from the binding of the bent cover had thrown him into some kind of spiral and it was like watching an action sequence play out in one my games how everything inside Marco seemed to flicker across his face in those five seconds before he slid himself down into the pile of pages. The tears in his eyes and closed periphery of where he was falling apart hadn’t mattered right that second and it made the guilt rise higher in my mouth as I had watched  his hands scrounge around the ground, trying to find his missing pieces.

He probably didn’t even realize how far lost he looked with his hands thrown around for minutes before giving up and letting his head drop against his chest as slow sobs racked his entire body back and forth. Marco wasn’t catching any bit of a break and with the guilt pushing me further to that edge with him, my instincts sent me into a frenzy to try to make it up to him.

Marco stayed on the ground as I ate the repulsively, cold remains of the macaroni and cheese – the bent and foreign shapes from that cartoon mom would sit me in front of when I was younger playing around on my spoon as I sent each bite in without much thought. The pasta had left me even more thirsty and although the water that sat on the bookshelf looked appetizing there was no way I would let myself make that first reach to grab it. Instead I was faced head-on with a surprisingly intense stare from Marco who had slammed the old bottle into my chest with a low thud. I wasn’t going to do it outright but I thanked him internally for a second. The saving grace that let me sip on something that wasn’t my own accumulating saliva.

Marco’s incessant mumbling for his mother continues and I resign myself to the task of setting up camp closer to the boy and letting my eyes roam over those freckles. The little dots that caught my eye that first second I’d seen him in the car was curious, the number of them so large on just his cheeks and bridge of the nose that it made me wonder how far those things went. Did they reach across his shoulders and down his entire back? Would he grow up and still have them racing across his body like a large game of connect the dots? Did they follow down even further to cover his butt like some kind of idiot that sat in a pile of red ants like the bald kid in class had back in first grade?

So many questions raced through my mind as I let my eyes flicker all over his face, mapping where most of the freckles tended to congregate. The masses of little dark brown dots populated so densely on his nose alone that it looked like he had smudged dirt across his face. Mom would’ve brought out the baby wipes to wipe that mess up the second she saw Marco.

Mom was like that. She would care so much she’d run herself to the ground and try to take you with her in a bundle of wooly blankets because catching a cold in hell would be the worst. She would be awake right now, woken up to a silent home where my cussing at the flat screen in my room didn’t ring through the ventilation. She was probably in a horrible slump trying to figure out where I could be. Where I’ve been the past few days. Has it been days? It feels like a week since I’ve seen my own bed – far away from sleeping freckles by my feet.

My parents would probably be making their way downstairs; mom going down to get the coffee and breakfast ready and dad already in the shower to make his way to the office early. He tended to get out of the house as soon as the sun rose above the horizon – most likely to avoid my grouchy mood. But under the circumstances, hopefully they’re running around, scrambling over clothes that have my scent on them and shoving them into a search dog’s nose to try to get me back home.

It’s been days now and the long wait of getting me back to my parents is irritating and unnecessary as I sit in my disgusting clothes, waiting for a chance to take a hot shower and brush my teeth with the strongest whitening toothpaste they sell. A chance to take off these sticky clothes and change my goddamn underwear before I tear a hole in them.

Why weren’t these dumbass kidnappers anything like the ones in the movies or video games? Where the bad guy gets his door rammed in and the boy is saved and he gets to hug his parents for a long amount of time while cutesy music plays in the background as everything moves in slow motion. The kidnappers get arrested and sent to prison and given the death sentence for taking a kid from a park and everything ends like a fairytale and I never have to see Marco again.

Why was this taking so long?

Marco starts to stir in his sleep, his legs hitching up towards his chest and inwards in some kind of automatic self-defense response and I look away as his face scrunches up around the edges of his eyes and his muttering nonsense gets louder. It’s hard to make out what he’s saying but he continues going on and on about whatever is on his dreams until he stops and sputters a line of drool onto the sheets. Fucking gross.

He opens his eyes, his head still dug into the sheets under his cheek and he blinks around – his eyes glassy from sleep. From where I am, sitting probably too close for comfort for the dark-skinned boy but who cares when I can see how the sheets have left marks and creases across his face and how sleep crystals sit in the corners of his eyes, waiting to fall away into the human dust accumulating in the room. It was still stuffy in here and the closeness of two bodies filtered through morning breath was getting to my head because wow did this cute look like a little child.

The freckles on Marco’s cheeks are somehow deeper over the pink of his cheeks from just waking and the way he rubs the back of his hands over his eyes like a child is downright adorable as he tries to figure out his surroundings. He looks like a kid.

He is a kid. And the way that he continues to swivel his head against the sheets as he rubs at his face is a clear sign of that. He’s a kid just like me; waiting for that person to come and save him and he probably just wanted a parent to show up and hug away the hurt just as much as Jean. The reminder of how shit it felt listening to Marco whine out for his mother that I haven’t even seen since the second I got to this house dropped like dead weight in my stomach as Marco squirmed his way to try to sit up but let himself lay there as I kept staring at him.

Marco is here with him – stuck with him – and he wanted an out that didn’t involve killing or maiming the main boss. He wanted to win without running away. Because he couldn’t run away under his circumstances as much as I can’t run away.

He digs his head into the sheets and lets his body relax in the hard down of the mattress, letting it settle on his back that I’m still there watching over.

He doesn’t care that I could knock him right the fuck out and tackle him into the bed and put him in a chokehold. He either doesn’t care or he chooses to ignore my presence. The floating thought that maybe he’s comfortable being so close to me runs in and out my head as I hear the thumping of a woken giant outside the door. The loud echo of feet hitting against hardwood thick in my ears as I stare up at the door on reaction. We both tense, waiting for the inevitable storm to enter the small room.

He’ll come in. He will remember that Marco was thrown in here and left to spend the night and everything will be fine for now. Marco will leave me alone and that’s fine. As long as Marco can get out of this place.

I’m somewhat aware that he’d sat up and slid down towards the edge of the bed. His feet hitting the ground quietly, nowhere on the dimensions of how loud his dad is walking the pace of the hallway on heavy feet.

The second the locks start clicking, angry muttering from outside hitting against the wood of the door but loud enough to make out the slew of profanity from the man outside.

Marco’s hands fist themselves into the sheets he’d been so comfortable on just five minutes ago, the white crinkling under his thin, dark fingers. He pulls them out from the sheets and rests them on his thighs as the door creaks open loudly like a hurricane blew it open leaving it barely on its own hinges if it weren’t for the amount of screws drilled into the doorway’s rimming.

His dad walks in and I turn to stare at Marco again. At how Marco seems to tense in front of his own dad and how he seems indecisive about his own existence in front of the large man. How much it resembles my own.

Dad’s absence at the breakfast table every morning didn’t limit to only him being a workaholic. He was an asshole. An uncaring asshole that tries to take advantage of how sweet mom is on him.

My reasoning may not be in anyway similar to what fear Marco feels from his dad, but the underlying hate (that seems horrible from their only sons) is thick between us. Another thing similar between us. Marco probably hated how his dad made him feel and how he treated him. I hated how useless dad was in my life, a constant enigma that seemed to solely exist to make mom’s life hell and to ignore the fuck out of me every chance he got.

Marco’s dad must be like that. Abusing Marco to the nth dimension and it obvious how deep that must go as I watch the boy visibly tense up even more when the man leans forward to grab the bowl at the foot of the bed next to Marco. The bowl is empty now, I made sure of it, but the scowl that flips onto his face is so severe, both Marco and I cringe at the sound of him clicking his teeth.

The man hums to himself and with a sudden jerk, he thrusts the bowl into Marco’s chest. He lets out a small “oof” from the force of it and almost tips backwards until he regains his balance on the bed, his hand flying back next to wear my legs are bent under me to stop himself.

The man turns to me without any regard for Marco rubbing his sore chest. “Good job. Looks like you’ll live for now off your own shit.”

I keep my mouth shut but hopefully the scowl that I’m sending back up at him is enough to get him to leave me the fuck alone. Eating old macaroni was already the worst thing ever. “Whatever,” I mutter to myself. I dig my hands in between my thighs, trying to find warmth in the unusually cool room.

The cold glare only chills me down further to the bone as he stares back at me – his eyes never wavering. “Marco go on and clean the mess outside you left collecting mold all night.”

Marco looks like he wants to say something – his mouth flapping open and closed as he stares at the bowl in his hands. But he leaves it alones, a good choice in my opinion, and collecting himself, he leaves the room with the bowl in hand. His other hand goes up to shut the door behind him but the tiniest crack is left hanging out under his rush to leave the vicinity. He sends a look back at me as he leaves, emotions on his face that I can’t place but the sense of dread filling the room isn’t unnoticeable and panic floods through my veins as I feel colder and colder

I turn back to face the man in front of me. The reason for the shit life I’ve been living for the past two or so days. The stubble on his jawline makes me want to vomit and the thought about his crusty, dry hands anywhere near me is so revolting I’d rather keel over and die here.

I can feel the color rush out of my face as I watch him grab the broken book still sitting where Marco had just been sprawled across the mattress. It was probably still warm from where his body heat had kept it safe from further destruction not less than a few minutes ago. That feeling of dread grows further as he flips through the pages with one hand and tosses the entire thing back onto the bed without a single fuck given.

“The room is pretty messy, huh? I don’t remember it being like this when I stuck your dumbass in here. Why would that be boy?”

I still, not even allowing myself to give a snarky remark. Something about this was off, more so than usual and the clench of heavy-looking fists is scaring the crap out of me.

“These pieces of paper had a home once. Like you. But looks like neither of will be going back the same, huh?” He pauses in his stepping over the pages on the floor. He swivels his feet across a couple of them as they crunch and rip even more under his weight. The man looks back up at me and I keep my gaze low, not wanting a confrontation so early in the day. “God it smells like fucking piss in here. Now that you’ve finally eaten it’ll probably get worse Jesus fuck.”

He stops his shifting over the pages, stooping down and wrapping his hand around one of those wooden picture books about different colors and shapes you reserve for little babies. He flips through it and studies its cover for a few seconds before standing back up at full height.

“Ya know? Just because you finally do something doesn’t excuse you from the bullshit you were pulling beforehand. It won’t right every other wrong you’ve committed, Jeanbo.”

It feels like a punch in the gut.

The rage that flashes red against the skin over my eyes is nothing compared to the rage that fills my veins, heating up what was already feeling deathly cold.

I’d probably get hypothermia from how searing it felt watching the smirk draw across the guy’s face as he called me by that name.

The man taps the book still in hand against his palm and the echoing hits across bare flesh feel like little tremors in the tiny room and my hands clench against my legs – my upper body wrapping itself inside further. He slides the edge of the spine across my cheek, laughing all the while as I shiver and close my eyes under the foreign feeling.

He hasn’t put his hands on me but this was getting to feel a lot worse. The thing was very prominent as it slid across my face, the tip of it outline my jawline and travelling over the bags under my eyes.

The man pulls away after a few seconds of ministrations and goes back to slamming the hard cover on his palms. The sounds of it reminiscent to sounds I’ve heard before. Not as foreign as feeling it across my own skin but the sounds of which similar to watching mom fall apart on the kitchen floor. My chest slamming in my chest and fists clenching hard against my legs – nails digging hard enough to pull blood from my ankles – enough to break skin.

I open my eyes and watch how his gaze turns all over me, his eyes glazing over and flittering every which way and when he takes the first step forward towards me I do everything to not slam my back straight back in and through the wall behind me to get away from him – to slam through however many inches of hard concrete to get a chance to put another few feet of distance between us.

Instead I look directly up through still sleepy eyes, scrunched up at the edges from exhaustion, daring the guy to do something but hoping to all hell and back that he won’t do anything.

“Pretty little things don’t belong in this house apparently.”

It’s all such a fucking game to this guy.

The last thing I see before I let my eyes shut tightly against the force is flexed arms and a horrifying sneer across the face too close for comfort.

There’s no mercy. Not really.

The weight of my own arms couldn’t even stand against it as everything shot through me like a lightning strike on a humid summer’s twilight. The skies etched in purple and blue as the clouds thickened and made the atmosphere feel even more dense over your head.

Unrestricted anger that didn’t explain anything and was given no explanation. All of it pulled at the edges and torn away from some kind of depth and poured over the flames raging inside of me – all of it still too overpowering to get me to react properly. There’s no way for me to counter and my hands feel as though they weigh tons by my sides as I try to find the space to swivel myself around.

Throwing myself against the thin mattress, using what I can of my arms to get some protection going against my head. The hits heavy against the thin material of my smelly shirt as each lasting pressure from the book digs further into my spine. Nails digging back into the sheets but different to the comfort Marco probably felt letting himself fall against the sturdiness of the bed under him.  

This is different to that. Way different to the comfort of the warm hug courtesy of your own body heat. There wasn’t a boy sitting next to me to show me that this wasn’t so bad.

_“It couldn’t have gotten any worse.”_

Yeah right.

This is far worse than any inconvenience that accompanied the act of pissing into a bucket and waking up with a dry throat.

There would be bruises left after this.

Bruises mom was sure to find once she comes to get me from this hellhole.

She has to be on her way.

In her car. Still driving circles around the block trying to find a lithe boy with too much chub in his cheeks.

She’s out there looking for me. Looking for her son that should still be wearing the pair of black sneakers he’d gotten for his birthday just a few months ago.

An 11th birthday present.

He’s saying something – something about how I’m useless and a waste of his time and patience. Muffled comments about how he couldn’t wait for the news about my parents giving up and paying the dues to take my “irrelevant ass” back to their “posh” house.

I clench my teeth, the thought of being sold back to my own parents sitting uncomfortably in my gut as I feel the book slam down at the nape of my neck making my whole back seize up in blind panic as it cuts deeper into my skin.

These are shots that I can’t catch; my arms locked underneath me in panic as my vision turns white with every strike – trying to stay conscious under the strain.

He’s aiming for the back, mostly.

He’s weak.

Maybe not physically as I feel every lasting impact from a book that couldn’t even be thicker than a turkey and cheese sandwich.

But he’s weak.

He can’t even look me in the eyes as he keeps slamming the book onto my head and back, too fast for me to recover and sit back up or run away.

\----

_Nintendo. PlayStation. Xbox. Gameboy Advance._

_It didn’t really matter at that point how many different things I owned or broke down with use._

_Dad brought me my first console when I was eight years old. He’d said that it was mom’s idea to give me something to do while I was home from school._

_Mom said it would keep me out of dad’s way._

_I mean she didn’t have to explicitly say it but the implications stayed heavy over the house every time the room tensed and she reminded me I had a game to finish up in my bedroom._

_So many games. So many consoles._

_So many birthdays spent unwrapping the same brand of paper from another stack of games or the latest system. Pretending that I was ecstatic to lock myself away in my room._

_A lie that turned into a routine._

_A routine that ran through my veins as hot as it could whenever I felt the itch._

_So many days of spending hours in my room forcibly that turned voluntary under strict schedualization of my weeks._

_Dad’s home. “I’m gonna go play some games.”_

_Dad’s yelling. “I’m going to my room.”_

_Dad’s on a rampage and dishes are shattering in the kitchen. “Please don’t-”_

_Dad’s on a business trip. “Can I buy noise-cancelling headphones now?”_

_It wasn’t like I was doing it on purpose – not like I was trying to hide away from my own dad because I knew that there was a high chance for a fight on the days dad came home late._

_Which usually ended up being every night._

_It was just a necessary thing in my life. An_ anchor _for all the poetic shits out there._

_Being born is considered the greatest act of creation, but then what are we supposed to do after?_

_After you realize that your mere existence was a façade played out to the extent until living was becoming tedious and useless to your own mindset, what is there to do?_

_You can’t forgive and forget._

_You can’t walk up to the cause of your entire being and shove your persistence down its face in a fit of anger._

_All you can do is ignore it; set it aside as a task for another day._

_Set it aside and pick up something else to distract your mind from all the chaos that’s happening around you._

_Find your own little thing to obsess about and ignore the fact that maybe there’s another slice of existence in the fucked up world that’s fighting a different battle just down the hall. A battle that may even concern you._

_But you can’t seem to find the strength or motivation to care beyond the small screen._

_Because it’s in your blood now – to let it slide by and distract yourself from it._

_To lie about what it means to you._

_To lie about how much you’re sorry for not doing anything because you’re only so tall up against the offense._

_To say “sorry mom”._

\----

I can feel my blood rushing through every part of my body. I’m exhausted and restless as the stinging swirls in my stomach go into maximum overdrive as I try to get back up to a sitting position

The man’s lashings slow in number over time and the blurry edges of my vision are finally coming into focus as I try to inch my way back to reality. The burn on my skin too hot to ignore.

I can tell that my breathing is ragged and strained and as the man stops altogether, I get the chance to choke down the musty air in large gulps that leave me choking on what little saliva I collect on my tongue. My heavy breaths matching alongside the weight of the air of the guy who’s somehow winded from however long it’s been since Marco left the room in some sick kind of game.

My throat is dry and I can feel the tears threatening to pool into the corners of my eyes and drip down my face but I still clear the clogged feeling of my throat closing in on itself and turn to face the guy over my shoulder. “What? Too old and crusty to keep up your abuse?”

It wasn’t the smartest thing to say, obviously, but it was all that I could think to say. The visions of red that had faded over the last few minutes coming back full force as I stare at what once was a perfect book now bent out of shape.

Marco’s book. A book that Marco had probably once read a million times over.

The reminder of the smallest voice I’ve ever heard – the quietest “mama” – that I wasn’t meant to hear echoes in my ears as I keep my eyes locked on the guy. Daring him to hit me again even as I feel the welts and stinging of my skin growing hotter under the cooler air. The afternoon sun doing nothing to subdue the burn.

All I can see is red and all I fear is the heat from the building bruises and the rage inside my chest building as the guy looks at me incredulously.

A single smack across the face leaves me cross-eyed and seeing stars – little lines and drawings etched into a certain strength of darkness that look at too familiar to the ones I’d just lined up not even an hour ago.

My head hits the bed and my eyes close as I feel the effects and the headache coming straight up from my spine to center itself across my entire forehead. The pain stinging all the more behind my eyes as I try to block any sort of sunlight from hitting my irises.

The man is mumbling again, his voice and words wavering and I have to strain myself to try to make out any words over the muffled words. There isn’t even enough energy in me to lift my head from the sheets to see why everything sounds like it’s being said through a dozen filters.

He’s saying something and for a second it sounds like straight up Spanish but the few words that my brain seems to catch are “almost” and “gun” and I groan loudly into the bed as my internal self tries to revolt against me for working too hard.

The urge to puke is strong and threatening against my resolve as I try to sit myself up and keep my head buried in the darkness of the sheets. There’s no energy inside of get me anywhere far and I know I probably look ridiculous with my ass in the air and my head down low like a shy ostrich.

It’s a blur on my own part, but the guy leaves at some point; the only sounds of his marching back to the door and it slamming echoing into my head again as it leaves my ears ringing.

There’d been the sound of someone hocking a loogie but it falls short of the effect he probably expected as I groan further into the bed, my head pounding.

The door’s locks click into place and I’m met with that eerie silence again. The thrilling emotions of being alone but also loneliness as I’m left to my own devices to try to get myself back together.

I can’t show how much they can affect me.

If I let the many see me weak, he’ll think I’m like a beanbag chair – ready to be tossed around the room as a ruse for nothing better to do.

I have to show that I can hold up my own.

I have to show them…

I have to-

-to let my eyes shut for a second and turn my vision’s edge black.

\---

It’s dark when I wake up. The lingering smell of piss has gone away and it’s easy to assume Marco is the reason for that. Instead of pee, the scent that fills the room is much warmer and honestly smells like the best damn thing in the world. Like I’ve been invited to Disneyland and given a week-long pass to just sit and smell the artificial perfumes they pump into the air to mask the smell of musky visitors and human trash.

A bowl of what looks like mutilated potatoes drenched in margarine sits at the end of the bed, the spoon stabbed straight into the center of a steamy mound of mush.

It looks disgusting and if it were different circumstance – if I were at home – I would’ve left it on my plate and taken the repercussions. Get my game controller taken away for the hour after dinner with no shits to give.  But the growl from my stomach as I stare at the bowl in spite has me reaching forward without any thought and grabbing onto the spoon with all my strength and shoveling the stuff into my mouth.

The food slides down my throat and the texture makes me gag but I swallow it down, too done to even care anymore. My hand pauses every few seconds as I take my time to breathe and keep myself from inhaling the mush, a reminder that although I’ve kept up a wall and façade in front of my kidnapper, I was becoming weak.

I don’t want to be weak.

But I also don’t want to starve.

So I eat the mashed potatoes with a heavy hand and swallow the mush down a dry throat with no chaser to make it feel and taste better.

I let it slide down my throat and settle in my empty stomach; hoping that the salt running tracks down my face won’t fall into the bowl before I have a chance to finish.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please excuse my half-assed chapter. I really just wanted to upload this thing and I'll probably take the time after finals are over to go back and mess around with a couple things. If I do, I'll leave a note before my next upload to check it out but other than that I hope you all like the chapter. I really wanted to show how things are starting to build up for Marco's dad and decomposing all around Jean. Also the building of Marco and Jean's friendship will be a key factor in later chapters and I hope with this chapter, i portrayed the right things. They're growing into each other and what I have planned should make an impact and hopefully this chapter helps. 
> 
> So let me know what you think. Leave comments and kudos or whatever. 
> 
> my tumblr is [mamaarachne](http://mamaarachne.tumblr.com/)


	7. Tempest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a storm coming. 
> 
> **Tempest**. | _noun_. | a violent commotion, disturbance, or tumult

The swirling of dark clouds and the purpling sky – the colors mixing together in a whirlpool of tones and textures – was barely visible from where I could see out the closed blinds of the living room window.

The tufts of airy fluff that peeked out from the holes of the tearing plastic strips looked like cotton candy against a painted scene of bubblegum flavors that edged further towards the horizon into a blackness that foretold storms to come. Storms on the horizon always felt so ominous during the twilight hours when the sun faded lower and the clouds happened to create the effects of finding yourself in some kind of fairy tale land.

The sky was beautiful; an amazing phenomenon that mom would take me out of the apartment to go to the park to look at properly. Watching the way the light refracted so perfectly that managed to blend yellow into pinks into purples that lasted until they floated into its white and blacks of night. But standing in the cold kitchen of a foreign home led onto to long stares at how dark the edges were rimmed over faraway houses. The distance between our window to the neighbors outlined by darkness and the promise of rain was over our heads and there was nothing that I could see away from that.

Mom used to say that the rain brought lightness to the earth. It was a sign of change and of good things to come of the future. She told me of old legends of folklore that spoke of rain as this gateway to different things during important stages of your life. When it rains at a wedding, it’s said that the couple will have a prosperous marriage filled with love and many children. If a downpour starts as the procession makes it way to the plot of land where the dead are buried, it is a sign that that person lived a happy and fulfilling life and the gods are looking down and praising and thanking them for being righteous.

The signs of rain are the signs of new life as the water bears down to replenish the land and clean the filth from the streets. But all I could see was how dark the clouds looked over broken and cracked roof tiles and rotting woods and rusty metals of old cars parked and long forgotten on driveways next to newer models.

This place was a mess. A town of rusty bolts and overgrown lawns slithered in between properly maintained homes that actually looked to be lived in. There was an assortment and variance in how “lived in” the houses looked and with each one there came a lot of uncertainties to who exactly lived behind each of those doors. So many chances that maybe there was a poor soul hiding behind hard wood and metal; kept inside to themselves away from other people. There were probably other kids somewhere down the road that if I listened close enough I could hear yelling against the summer sun and whirling water hose. People that worked normal jobs and came home to normal families and their normal lives with no knowledge of the boys locked away inside with no contact with the outside world.

The memory of neighbors watching as I dragged bags into the house so many days ago flashed behind my eyes as I kept glancing back at the broken blinds and the growing threat of the clouds afar. These people outside know that there’s at least one kid living in this place and they’ll grow curious and worried as to why I haven’t made an appearance outdoors in the days we’ve been here. I tell myself to let dad know that the threat of concerned strangers and a summer storm are looming in the not too far distance.

After he comes out of the backroom where the thumping and mumbling have echoed down into a simmer of noises on my ears. My hands blindly grabbing at boxes of things dad must’ve brought in from the house and loading its contents into empty shelves and cabinets mindlessly. The threat of the storm looming over the house even more as night comes faster and the clouds shift even closer to us.

I relent myself to cleaning up the kitchen, my hands working circles into the plates and glasses with an old dishrag before sticking the things back onto the shelves. Everything needed to be proper, no room for faults or discrepancies on how this house was ran. Neither mom nor the naysayers should have a chance to ruin the image that needed to be maintained in a house in the middle of nowhere.

I mean I’m pretty sure that was part of the plan. Was there really even a plan?

Did dad even have a plan laid out?

The rumble of the dark clouds intermingled with that bounce of cars on the cracked and potholed roads outside the limits of our front yard filtered in through one ear and out the other as all that I could focus on was the sound of heavy steps coming back towards the front of the house as a door slammed shut.

Dad walked down from the hallway, a near replica of one of those runway walks mom used to let me watch with her before, but stilted by the hunch in his shoulders and spine as his legs seemed to drag along the hardwood towards where the counter separated the space between us and butchered by the scowl on his face directed towards nothing in particular. His hands are strained around the book in his hands, the binding of the hard pages torn and falling at its edges.

The pages were crumpled and worn at the edges as it looked to have been slammed repeatedly into the ground.

The slam of the pages on hard ground wouldn’t make sense with the noises of Jean whimpering through the slightly open door.

I felt myself freezing in the middle of the kitchen as dad moved closer towards the countertop, my whole body stopping as my mind went in every direction as to why the book looked so bent out of shape and broken and how broken Jean must look down the hall.

There was no plan.

This was all a mix of on the spot decisions and Jean just became the brunt of the repercussions of something neither of us could control.

My hands tighten around the ceramic of the fancier dinner plates we’d managed to preciously maintain since mom passed. Both on instinct and fear that I would drop them by the slightest jostle and fear that if I do release hold of them, they might go shattering into something other than the hardwood floors.

Dad’s grip on the books lifts and loosens as he tosses the thing across the countertop between us. The book, an old children’s book on shapes and colors, slides for the few seconds the ripped pages allow before getting caught on itself and stopping closer to where I’m standing near the cabinets.

Although I’d always been tall for my age, my height the most noticeable thing about me when it came to lining up by classes early in the mornings on the school’s blacktop, the pinewood of the cabinets above my head feel especially tall in that moment. The edges of the sturdy shelves just out of reach that if I were to slip from my place standing on my toes, I’d cause a mess that would knock my nose out of place and shatter years of memories in the form of dinnerware.

The book rests on the counter between us as I set the dishes down from my slightly shaky hands. I can feel the tremor building straight from my center and manifesting into the tips of my fingers and making its way down to my toes. It’s the feeling you get when a strong winter chill makes its way through the cracks in the walls and doors and rushes over your uncovered body as you try to get dressed before you lose all feeling in your extremities. Something you can’t control yourself and have to wait for it to pass because there’s nothing you can do but wait until it finishes washing over you.

But there isn’t a chill in the air for miles of the city they live in. Their home basically located in the deserts of California outside downtown Trost was hot enough to cook an egg off the sidewalk dirt. The air as muggy and dry as the space between your bellybutton from days of forgoing a proper bath. The air in the house was heated and sparks flew in every corner as the skies electrified with a summer storm promising more electricity than actual water.

Dad trundles over to the couch, his feet heavy on the floor and he slams down hard on the cracked leather. The thick texture of the fabric squeaks and groans under his weight but he ignores it in favor of shoving his hand into the pocket of his “dad” jeans and pulling out a cell phone. After punching in a couple of buttons, he brings the end of the receiver to his ear and I turn over my shoulder before he can see me watching his movements.

The phone must ring once or twice but he’s soon mumbling words into the end, his garbled lingo incoherent until I hear him clear his throat suddenly and grow serious.

Must be the head guy.

I’d met him a couple of times – or rather, I’ve watched the way he paced holes into the floors of their apartment from around the corner of too thin walls. The man was large and intimidating and there was no chance in bloody hell that I would ever come face-to-face with the guy without peeing my pants in fright. Mom was still there at the time and most of the hours inside that were spent sharing the same air as the large man were hours spent hiding behind the thin silk of her nightgown in my room – waiting for the meetings to finish.

The man always looked so serious from what little I was able to make out of his face. His eyebrows seemed so etched into his face. He couldn’t have been that old but the unsettling wrinkles that lined the edges of his eyes and mouth aged him like crazy.

The guy was always plastered with the airy attitude that dripped with sarcasm and falsities. He acted as though he cared about how my day was at school those times he’d managed to cross paths with me on the walk up the stairs; those moments running my blood cold and limbs stiff. It was all an act that belonged in a community theater considering how put-on it all seemed.

Dad had raved for a long, tiring week when we’d still lived in the apartment about bringing in the boss for a night of food and drinks. I’d promised long ago to handle myself with poise and to stay out of the way but the vibes that radiated and vibrated straight into my veins from the man was strong and vicious. I couldn’t get myself to look the man in the eyes as we shook hands in greeting. His entire being was sour and the ridges of his chapped hands clung onto my hands long after we’d released our holds.

The man spent the afternoon, necking down can after can of the supply we kept in the small fridge across from the dining table, sipping gingerly at the sparse amount of hard liquor dad kept hidden poorly away under the sink next to the cleaning supplies. The location of the stuff always seemed the stupidest train of decision-making. One drunk stumbly night later and there was a chance that mom and I could be waking up to a man foaming at the mouth with the stench of bleach wafting through the room and lingering into the floorboards under the thin carpeting. And as I stuffed the bottles that dad had brought in to this new place in their rightful place between the dark black pipes under the sink, the dread grew larger as I overheard his side of the conversation.

Well, not much a conversation as it is an exercise on dad’s part to agree to all terms and conditions over a cellular phone.

Days were spent preparing and then hours left getting everything ready. I remember spending most of it in my room, reading anything I could get my hands on, and the rest of it in the kitchen helping mom prepare. The entire time avoiding any ounce of the acid stare the large man and the friends he brought along could offer. The same acid stare that refracted straight into how dad would look at him for the rest of the night. It was like dad was forced into soaking up all of the bad energy the guy let out and announcing it his job to do the same deeds. An emulation of the real deal sitting next to him. It was like dad was trying his best to become a direct photocopy of this bad man and considering how expensive it was, it started costing everyone a lot to keep up the game.

Mom used to tell me to let it be. To let it happen around me. Even as I felt the walls crashing down around and the sting of water lapping at my throat, all I could do was give and forget. I didn’t like what the man was turning my dad into and that night that left my ears ringing from the hellfire in the room next door, she told me to always remember to be nice. To remember the Giving tree and someday I would have that respect dad was fighting so hard to get from the large man.

As I stand back up from where I’m crouched down under the sink, my eyes fall onto the scene outside the little window over the counter in front of me.

The clouds are really rolling in and the vague smatterings of pink and purple have turned into blues and dark greys that blanket over everything like an eerie haze. The houses in the distance and the trees far away feel as they their captured inside a vignette; threatening to overwhelm its contents. A rumble sounds from afar. It’s not close enough to shake the foundation of the house, but it hits hard as it, for a second, blocks out the sounds of dad speaking.

I watch as the sky grows darker; my ears still pressed into the coughing and sputtering coming from the living room. There are sparks in the house and I can feel it as it seems to electrify even more as the storm clouds come closer. The summer storm a peace in a relatively dry town and sending sparks down to the land below in place for a dry passby.

There won’t be any rain. Not today.

Nothing threatening to raise the levels of an already overflowing pool.

Not yet.

My hands grip into the ledge of the sink – my nails digging into the pale white enamel as I make sure my breathing doesn’t give off any signals.

I can hear everything he’s saying now. His words ringing in my ear as every syllable and every enunciation echoes deep enough to muffle itself into my head.

I can feel my teeth grinding against itself and my eyelids flittering against my cheeks as I take deep breaths to calm myself.

My heart’s going mad and it feels like…it feels like drowning. It feels like being dragged down from my ankles and no matter how hard I fight it, no matter how hard I push, I can’t my fingertips to cling onto open air.

As my vision teeters on the edge, I watch myself falling down deep into my own little hell.

“Yeah. I gave the kid a few whacks to remind him that I’m in charge and he doesn’t get to decide if he gets to starve to death. Just like you said I shou-”

There’s a silence as he listens to the man on the phone. The same man whose face I can remember perfectly. Pulling me straight down further; or maybe he’s the one pushing. 

The shine of his threatening smirk glinting in whatever light there must be to allow me to his face. A man that could’ve been anything but a menace in our family. The reason that everything was happening.

“Think he took it well…sir if you don’t mind me asking…yes of course sir I was just wondering have you heard from the parents or police yet about the money.”

There’s another pause and from the corner of my eye I can see him tense under the silence. With a snap of his head and a smirk on his face, his entire demeanor changes as he lounges back against the leather plush.

Someone else must be on the phone now.

“This kid is killing me with having to make sure he doesn’t dip out and dehydrate…yeah well I’m not interested in holding him here forever I already have one I’m stuck with.”

That snaps me back to what I was doing and before I let him see that I haven’t moved since the phone call had started, I move down behind the counter and rummage through a box, searching for absolutely nothing. Dad seems to take it in stride as he resumes talking.

“He’s a little smartaleck. Thinks he’s a fucking prince in distress and deserves a royal bath drawn for him. Piece of shit really...well then come fucking take him then…whatever tell me when the deal is done.”

I hear the click of the end call button as it feels like an echo into a quiet room.

I can feel my heart slamming in my chest and the thoughts running through my head. What are they going to do to Jean? What exactly are we even waiting for? How much of this money is involved and is Jean’s parents supposed to fork it over? Did-did I ever tell him my name?

I look around the corner of the cabinets, my body stiff as I try to make as little noise as possible other than the sturdy slams of mugs onto the shelves. Dad doesn’t seem to hear my scuffling across the linoleum as I peek over at his hunched form. His hands are running circles into his sparse hair and I can see the small traces of something across his face.

His fingers linger at the nape of his neck, stressing the roots and ends that’ll only cause more peppered strands over time.

He looks like a mess.

A loud rumble shakes the house and from the corner of my eye I watch the few mugs stacked towards the back of the shelves rattle. The storm is getting closer and I’ve never been very keen on the rumbles and shakes that the lightning and thunder would cause – keeping the thud of my chest close and wrapped in multiple blankets to muffle the sounds. But this time it’s different. If feels so different as my eyes glance over my dad sitting like he’s just lost a million to his name.

If feels like I’m not even there; like I’m forced into this moving picture that isn’t supposed to be my life. This isn’t. I should still have a mother; there shouldn’t be a blond boy in the room down the hall; dad should be making my favorite dinner of chicken apple sausages and rice. I should be reading in my room wrapped in blankets and waiting for mom to bring in a cup of hot marcocoa.

It’s feels like weightlessness in a pool. My body drifting along the surface of the water except I’m not on the right side of the surface. It’s a weightlessness that leaves me under and gasping around tons of water that pushes against every millimeter of my body. My fingertips so close to grazing against the surface tension and breaking through but not enough to let an ounce of air into my lungs.

It’s too much and the storm is drawing closer. Once the water hits – breaking that tension – it’ll be too much to handle.

My fingers curl around the solid figure in my pocket. The little cherub head that mom cherished until the day she died felt solid and good as I squeezed into between my fingers over the fabric of my pants. The feeling of it digging into me was enough for now and even as I could feel that tumultuous dread growing overhead, it was okay for those few seconds as I let my head fall against the pale wood of the cabinets, trying to even out my breathing.

Everything could only get better. Once everything was figured out, it has to all get better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the shorter-than-last-time chapter. For some reason the fic was just escaping me and I couldn't figure out for a while what I wanted to dish out and what I wanted to keep for later but I think I got a handle on things. Please leave comments and kudos and whatnot as it really helps me do the thing and actually write for my favorite fic. This thing is still my baby and means probably too much to me but any ideas or theories and comments really make my day so much better. 
> 
> I know the whole waiting a whole month for chapters is ridiculous considering I'm on summer break, but I've gotten quite distracted in the past few weeks and let's just say there might be other fandoms added to my ao3 trash bucket *cough* Owari *cough*
> 
> [tumblr](http://mamaarachne.tumblr.com/)

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by a reoccurring dream I used to have when I was little. It was terrifying but every time I had the dream, I knew more about the boy behind the heavy door. And maybe I kinda wanted to give it a happier fairy tale seeing as I haven't had a conclusion for the dreams in the past 6 years.
> 
> I'm basically posting word vomit but I am tempted to write out my entire dream so we'll see how that goes between updating Locked and school starting soon. 
> 
> So let me know what you think and tell me if it gives you the creeps or if there any other tags I should probably put on here. Comments are very much welcomed with open arms.


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